Political Empowerment of Women in India: Status and Challenges

Women constitute almost 50% of the world's population but India has shown disproportionate sex ratio whereby female's population has been comparatively lower than males.There are 940 females per 1000 male. Literacy rate of males is 82.14% while of female is 65.46 %. As far as their social status is concerned, they are not treated as equal to men in all the places.Though women's are equally competent to men in every activity but they are highly involved in reproductive role only.Despite of various researches, programmes and policies of Government, international agreements, conferences, recommendations and passing of women reservation bill in Parliament, the participation of women in politics is still lacking behind and it is very low in comparison to men in India. The political participation meaning is not confined only to right to vote given forwomen but it also involves active participation of women in political consciousness , activism and decision making process. We can see that women is empowered to some extent economically, socially, nutritionally as well as technology, but the pace of political empowerment is too much slow among them. So, this is matter of great concern for our nation, why women is not giving their participation in politics and women should be involved in local as well as national decision making bodies. Gender equality could be achieved by strengthening women's rights and addressing barriers to their political participation.