Women Empowerment in India Let’s have a look at some of the headlines published in the newspapers of late: “Women Empowerment is necessary for the economic development of the country-PM”, “Women Empowerment Bill introduced in the Parliament”, “Court approves reservation for women in Panchayats”, “Give big boost to women empowerment: Information and Broadcasting Minister”, etc. Why is it that we have been talking too much about women empowerment recently? To answer this question, we must, first, understand what exactly is meant by women empowerment, why there is any need to empower women and what possibly can be done to achieve this feat. Women Empowerment is the ability of women to exercise full control over their actions. This means control over material assets, intellectual resources and even over their ideologies. It involves, at the psychological level, women’s ability to assert themselves which has, so far, been constricted by the ‘gender roles’ assigned to them especially in a culture like India which resists changes.
Gender inequality has been part and parcel of an accepted male-dominated Indian society throughout history. It was embedded within the social hierarchy and this affected how women and men were perceived in leadership roles. Women were expected to be bound to the house, while men went out and worked. This division of labour was one of the major reasons why certain evils like ‘Sati Pratha’, ‘PardahSystem’, ‘Child Marriage’, ‘Dowry System’, etc.
took birth in our society. The traditional Indian mentality assumes that the place of women is mainly concentrated to the household activities like kitchen work and upbringing of the children. They have been considered as the sex-object and inferior to men in every sphere of knowledge. Even after 63 years of our independence, women are still one of the mostpowerless and marginalized sections of Indian society.
The 2001 Census shows that the sex ratio for India is 933, which is among the lowest in the.
