Women’s group initiatives: A path to empowerment and gender equality

Women’s empowerment is a multidimensional process which should enable the individual or a group of individuals to realize their full identity and powers in all spheres of life. It consists of greater access to knowledge and resources, greater autonomy in decision making to enable them to have greater control over the circumstances that influence their lives and free them from shackles imposed on them by custom, belief and practices. Empowerment is a process that involves intellectual enlightens, economic enrichment and social emancipation on the part of women. Self Help Groups (SHGs) have emerged as major agents of development and empowerment of weaker sections in the thirds world. In India, since the beginning of the Ninth Plan, most of the development programmed are channeled through SHGs. There is a common perception that women who join SHGs are not only become economically empowered but becomes powerful in many ways. They gain a say in family matters and their social status is enhanced. Under this circumstance in the present paper an attempt has been made to judge at what extent SHGs contribute to the improvement of women awareness and overall development or empowerment of women. . In our study 15 SHGs formed under SGSY (now re-structured as NRLM) have been selected by applying stratified random sampling method form the Bankura District of West Bengal and at the same time we have also tried to judge the awareness level of 50 poor adult females selected randomly from 50 Non SHG households in the same District. All the SHG and Non SHG households belong to BPL category. The study concluded that the non-SHG households suffer worst and women empowerment of the SHG households is still in process at the moderate level.