Measurement of Empowerment in the Schedule Tribe Women out of the SHG Members: Study on Paschim Medinipur District and Jhargram District in West Bengal, India

Abstract

To fulfil the developmental objectives, a nation should make the women fully empowered in all the aspects. The United Nation’s sustainable development goal, Agenda 5, focuses upon gender equality in terms of increasing all sorts of empowerment to the women section of the society. Out of the general women empowerment the empowerment of the scheduled tribe women is seriously lacking in many countries and the states and districts thereunder. In India, the empowerment of the women is mostly encouraged through the involvement in the Self-help Groups (SHGs). The present study undertakes two sample districts, widely tribal populated, Paschim Medinipur and Jhargram in the state of West Bengal in India to examine whether the tribal women in the districts are empowered in three aspects, social, financial and political domains using primary data. It measures empowerment by means of grand dimension index using the data on age, education, income, whether memberships with SHGs, etc. For 300 SHG and 200 non-SHG members in the two districts separately, and then compares the results across the SHG members in the two districts in one hand, and SHG and non-SHG members within a single district on the other. The primary results show that about 31 % of the SHG members are empowered in the Paschim Medinipur District and about 20 % in the case of Jhargram District. On the other hand, only 7 % and 2.5% of the non-SHG members are having high magnitudes of empowerment in the Paschim Medinipur and Jhargram respectively.