Women’s empowerment is the process in which women expand and recreate what it is that they can be, do, and accomplish in a circumstance that they previously were denied. Women feel empowered when they can do the things that are supposed to be only for men, you know? It breaks boundaries, it’s liberating, and it’s empowering when you feel like. ‘Well, I can do that, too. ‘Empowering women leads to a more inclusive growth of society and the nation. In Indian mythology, woman is an incarnation of Shakti, the goddess of power. We believe women empowerment is vital to our development and the progress of humanity is incomplete without the empowerment of women. Indian women continue to lead in different walks of life and are vehicles of changes and instruments of India’s transformations.
The Constitution of India has affirmed that the human rights of a women are very much alive and kicking whether she is married or not and deserve recognition and acceptance. Now policy makers, law enforcement, the judiciary and others must take concrete steps to implement this and ensure women and girls their human and legal rights. This should translate into respecting the bodily autonomy of every woman and girl, including destigmatising and decriminalizing sexual activity among adolescents and upholding their reproductive rights.
The women being heard now have a certain visibility and influence. They are guaranteed to be heard by the media and social media. Harassment is not about sex, it is about inequality at work, about erasing a women’s worth, her mind, her competence and reducing her to a body. And a women who do climb high in their professional worlds are not exempt from these patterns of domination, even if they personally escaped them. India had its own reckoning a few years ago, after the Delhi gang rape, for a brief and vivid season, the question of women’s freedoms, their full rights, their autonomy occupied public discourse. We saw the extent of sexual violence, the fear of it, the way it is reinforced by institutional hostility and popular culture, the way it cramps women’s autonomy. Laws on rape were amended, police reforms were promised. But real change has not been easy or linear, as the later life of those very laws makes clear. Social norms remain stubborn, power has a male form. In some ways, our freedoms have retreated since, as conservative forces became ascendant in India. The women’s movement has been building strength, deepening and diversifying for decades. The quest for justice zing and zags – Bhanwari Devi, the Rajasthani social worker who was gangraped, is still to get justice, but because of her, Indian women now have a law against sexual harassment at work place. The Nirbhaya moment may have gone, but the constituency it mobilized remains awake and vigilant. Women’s rights are championed instrumentally and insincerely, as in the triple talaq cause. There is a greater attention to the complexity of domination, how womanhood is one axis, caste, class and race are others and how feminism must include them to be meaningful. More women are speaking up, boosting each other’s signal, pushing back against the norms, giving precise words to male entitlement with terms like mansplaining, manterrupting, manels etc. We don’t have to delude ourselves about the power and resilience of those we confront. The fact of inequality continues to distort everything in a women’s life. There may be exceptions.
For the purpose of making women aware and organized by GANGA SEWA SAMITI, work is being done by adopting the strategy of working by connecting women with self-help. Women are being added to the group by forming self-help groups of women in the village. By organizing women in groups, they are being prepared to fight for social change by making them familiar with gender discrimination and its side effects. So that women themselves can ensure their own contribution in furthering the work of social, political and economic change. In order to take this campaign forward, she works to increase dialogue on women’s issues and inform them about their side effects and consequences. For this, apart from holding regular meetings of the groups, the organization organizes seminars and workshops from time to time. So that women can bring comprehensive change by taking this fight for change to a decisive level.