Women’s Empowerment and Social Status Through Self-Help Groups (SHGs)

Abstract

The Social Empowerment of Women includes equal access to Education, Health, Environment, Shelter, Nutrition, etc. Equal access to education for women and girls will be ensured. Special measures will be taken to eliminate discrimination, universalize education, eradicate illiteracy, create a gender-sensitive educational system, increase enrolment and retention rates of girls and improve the quality of education to facilitate life-long learning as well as development of occupation/vocation/technical skills by women. In view of growing improvements in the socio-economic condition of women efforts were made to maximize the participation of women in different educational levels, with the notion that education is the most important instrument to bring awareness about their rights, social status, as a prime element to maximize participation in different kinds of productive employment. Data on various social, economic and demographic characteristics, of respondents used in this study pertain to 150 scheduled caste women who are members of SHG. Gulbarga City of Karnataka state. All the SHGs in this city were surveyed at the time of data collection for an in-depth study by a researcher. During the course of enumeration, SHGs having only scheduled caste women members identified and all such available scheduled caste SHG women were interviewed. The second stage of data collection involved visits to respective SHGs where there were SC women available for conducting detailed interviews about the research study purpose. The data was collected during the months of November and December in the year 2025. Throughout the period of data collection, the researcher rather spent full day in the SHG and had the opportunity to have a first hand experience of living and working amongst the respondents.