Empowerment of women through Stree Shakti programme in Mysore

There are a variety of understandings of the term empowerment due to its widespread usage. If empowerment is looked upon in terms of ability to make choices: to be disempowered therefore, implies to be denied choice. The notion of empowerment is that it is inescapably bound up with the condition of disempowerment and refers to the processes by which those who have been denied the ability to make choices acquire such ability. Thus, there could be statistical swells indicating improvements in indicators of gender equality, but unless the intervening process involved women as agents of that change, one cannot term it as ‘empowerment’. People who exercise a great deal of choice in their lives may be very powerful, but they are not empowered, because they were never disempowered in the first place. Empowerment cannot be defined in terms of specific activities or end results because it involves a process whereby women can freely analyze, develop and voice their needs and interests, without them being pre-defined, or imposed from above. The assumption that planners can identify women’s needs; runs against empowerment objectives. Here we come to know the economic and social condition of women who are under the stree-shakti programme, to identify the working of stree Shakti programme and what is the impact of stree Shakti programme on its members. By the use of questionnaires and sampling techniques, the primary data is collected for data analysis. Here we are discussing about the empowerment of women through stree shakti programmes in Mysore district .Primary data has been taken into consideration to analyze the impact of stree shakti progamme on the beneficiaries.