Gender Inequality and Women\'s Empowerment
Contents: Foreword/Sujit K. Basu. Acknowledgements. 1. Introduction/Ashim Kumar Adhikary and Rathindra Nath Pramanik. 2. Gender inequality and roles in India/Asha Mukherjee. 3. Place of women in Indian society: a plea for new agenda/Dhrubajyoti Bhaumik and Mitali Mazumdar. 4. Gender inequality and rural development programmes: some observations/Sasanka Sekhar Pal. 5. Dowry syndrome in Indian Panorama/S.N. Chatterjee. 6. Gender is an endanger issue in modernity/Gopal Chandra De. 7. Gender inequality in India: a critical review/Debashis Sarkar. 8. Education of the girl child/Manjulika Ghosh. 9. Empowerment of women and towards a solution of the women problem/Aparajita Mukherjee. 10. Empowering rural women through science and technology/S. Chowdhury. 11. Reflections on the empowerment of women/Ranju R. Dhamala. 12. Women\'s empowerment in India: myth, reality and celluloid representations/Samdatta Mandal. 13. Gender empowerment measures: a review/Maitreyi Chaudhuri. 14. Women\'s empowerment--some initiatives/Rathindra Nath Pramanik. 15. Women empowerment: the changing scenario through Self Help Group/Sujit Kumar Paul.
"The book attempts to highlight the discrimination against women and removal of discrimination through empowerment of women. Discrimination against women is found in every culture and society in varying degrees. It is manifested in various domains of life and activity: economic, social, political and religious. As a result of gender discrimination, the status of women is subordinate to men and they have little access to education, food, nutrition, health care, employment and wages.
Empowerment of women involves the improvement of their status in the family, community and society. It ensures women\'s accessibility to modern development facilities and extends their participation in social, economic and political process and decision-making. Efforts have been made by the government to empower women by adopting some legislative measures and development programmes for women.
The book is largely the outcome of One-Day Regional Seminar on gender inequality held at the Department of Social Studies and Rural Development (Palli Charcha Kendra), Visva-Bharati, Sriniketan in February, 2004. The authors deal with aspects of gender inequality both in text and context, process of women\'s empowerment, the accessibility of women to development facilities as well as their actual power positions in the society and state. Problems of the gender empowerment measure in the context of rural India have been noted and a set of indicators has been suggested to confront the reality.
The book would find clientele among students, scholars, teachers, feminists, policy makers and development workers having interest on women upliftment and empowerment." (jacket)
