Tag: women education

The Challenges and Prospects of Women Empowerment

The Challenges and Prospects of Women Empowerment

What is Women Empowerment?

Women’s empowermentis the process of empowering women. It may be defined in several ways, including accepting women’s viewpoints or making an effort to seek them, raising the status of women through education, awareness, literacy, and training.

     Challenges of Women Empowerment

The major hurdles in the process of empowering women are loads of Problems that were faced by women in past days and still today up to some extent are Gender discrimination, Lack of Education, Female Infanticide, Financial Constraints, Family Responsibility, Low Mobility, Low ability to bear Risk, Low need for achievement, Absence of ambition for the achievement. Atrocities on Women such as Raped, Kicked, Killed, Subdued, humiliated, Deserted and divorced Women. Social stigma and the fear of abandonment by the family play a big role in women and girls’ ability or inability to access laws and policies to address sexual and physical violence.

Some other factors that pose the challenge in realizing women’s empowerment are Poverty, Health and Safety, Professional and household Inequality.

     Prospects of Women Empowerment

More than ever before, today’s young women have more choices and control in their lives. They had the most choices in education, the least in career choices. Women are touching heights in almost all fronts be it politics, science, technology, defense, administration and in society in general. This has become possible because of slowly changing social perspective towards women.

 In recent years, the traditional roles of women have undergone some changes due to economic needs, and some efforts were made to bring visibility and mainstream women’s contribution to the overall growth and development of society. The status of women has changed considerably. Women have made significant strides in all fields, although their number remains insignificant. 

Smt. Pratibha Devi Singh Patil became first women president of India 12th President of India. Sakshi Malik became the first Indian woman to win an Olympic medal for wrestling at the 2016 Rio Olympics in the 58 kg freestyle category and PV Sindhu bagged a silver medal at the 2016 Beijing Olympics in Badminton.

The Indian Government has paid special attention to women’s empowerment, and both the National Policy for Empowerment of Women (NPEW) 2001, as well as the 10th Five Year Plan, illustrate its commitment to women’s empowerment and welfare. The Government of India has initiated a number of schemes and Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India has started so many Programmes for the empowerment of Women.

v    Conclusion

When women are empowered they get the right to speak up, get a proper education, have a fixed income, do not become victims of early child marriage or domestic violence and do not have to face harassment. Also when women will be empowered, they will have their daughters empowered as well. Women empowerment cannot be possible unless women come with and help to self-empower themselves or other women for which they will be paid back for their, support love and care to each other. Besides they will live in more developed and educated society.

 

Girls and women across the country

 As per All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE), the overall enrolment of female students in higher education has been consistently increasing over the years. Table below gives female, male and total enrolment in higher education between 2015-16 and 2019-20. The enrolment of females has increased by about 18% from 1.60 crore in 2015-16 to 1.89 crore in 2019-20.

Enrolment in Higher Education from 2015-16 to 2019-20

Year

 

Enrolment

Growth (%) in enrolment over the previous year

% Female enrolment 

Female

Male

Total

Female

Male

Total

2015-16

15990058

18594723

34584781

      

46.2

2016-17

16725310

18980595

35705905

4.6

2.1

3.3

46.8

2017-18

17437703

19204675

36642378

4.3

1.2

2.5

47.6

2018-19

18189500

19209888

37399388

4.3

0.0

2.2

48.6

2019-20

18892612

19643747

38536359

3.9

2.3

3.0

49.0

Growth (%) in enrolment during 2015-16 to 2019-20

18.2

5.6

11.3

 

(source: Compiled from  AISHE reports of different years)

 

The steps taken/being taken by the Government to promote education among girls and women are as follows:

      1. Issuing of new UGC regulation for Open and Distance Learning that allows entry of reputed institutions to offer education on the distance mode.
      2. Use of ICT technology- SWAYAM portal to take the best teaching resources to all, including the most disadvantaged.
      3. Opening of more centrally funded institutions.
      4. Encouraging opening of institutions by State Governments through the Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA) which aims to achieve equity, access and excellence in higher education. The scheme supports components such as upgrading autonomous colleges to universities, clustering colleges to establish a university, setting up of new professional colleges in un-served and underserved areas as well as providing infrastructure grants to universities and colleges to scale up capacity.
      5.  More scholarship programmes to supplement the cost of education.
      6. Additionally, as per the recommendations of National Education Policy (NEP), 2020, the following steps are being initiated by the Government to ensure equitable access to the highest quality of education for all learners, especially women, regardless of social or economic background:
        1. A Gender Inclusion Fund will be constituted by Government of India to provide quality and equitable education to all girls. The fund will focus on ensuring 100% enrolment of girls in Schooling and a record participation rate in higher education. 
        2. Free hostel facilities will be made available for all women.
        3. New multi-disciplinary HEIs (including those specially for women) will be opened in or near every district.
        4. Special scholarships for women/transgender/ divyang will be introduced.
        5. Guidelines and advisories will be issued and monitoring mechanism will be put in place to ensure basic facilities amenities and safe, secure environment in all HEIs for women.