Economic Empowerment of Tribal Women in Tripura through Self Help Groups: A Study in Sepahijala District

Economic empowerment of tribal women can never be understood without proper understanding of their daily income source and difficulties faced by women in search of jobs or works as source of earning for making financially stable in their life. Empowerment is a basic requirement of every human being most specifically the vulnerable, poor, voiceless women in the third world countries. Tribal women are by nature dependent, economically less empowered as well unable to grab advantages of opportunities provided to them despite implementation of various schemes, on the other hand whereas urbanisation, modernisation and globalisation have taken shape since from 90s but numerous tribal women still remain in the same sphere. Thus, the emergence of Self Help Group has become successive and effective mechanisms for providing financial services to the poor and economically disadvantaged people especially the tribal women in strengthening their self help capacities to uplift them, to assemble them to be self-reliant which leads to economic empowerment. Thus, as positive outcome tribal women came out of their domain involving themselves as an active participants in group meetings, planning for saving as a credit based systems.Therefore, Self Help Groups has earmarked as one of the indicating tool for economically challenging tribal women in every corner of the country. This paper is based on primary sources relying on empirical study and secondary sources of information which includes books, journals etc. In this context this paper has discussed the concept of economic empowerment of tribal women along with the activities of SHGs towards empowering tribal women in Sepahijala District of Tripura and whether SHGs could really enhanced their status towards economic empowerment.