Rural Women Empowerment through SHG Federations in Telangana, India: A Path Analysis Approach

It is been almost two decades since ‘empowerment’ emerged as a buzzword. The development policies often change their loci of attention in framing the solutions for betterment of society and ‘empowerment’ of women has emerged as a powerful tool in this process. As rightly put by Neila Kabeer, empowerment entails a process of change. Several Self Help Groups federation models have been taken up by various state governments in India exclusively for nurturing women's self-help groups in rural areas that lead to the change. The federations, of which Indira Kranthi Patham is one, provide monetary and non-monetary assistance for women and also facilitate entrepreneurship. The present study tries to find out the rural women empowerment of SHGs in Ranga Reddy District. Path analysis is used for analysis. The women are divided into two groups – micro-entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs and paths of empowerment for both these groups have been identified. Multi-group analysis is done along with pairwise parameters for assessing the statistical significance of differences in paths. The major finding of the study is the variation in the paths of empowerment of both groups. Six domains of empowerment were used for the study namely – cognitive empowerment (empowerment from within), economic empowerment, empowerment within the family, social empowerment, political empowerment and collective empowerment. The most striking findings of the study are cognitive empowerment, and empowerment within the family are comparatively high among entrepreneurs whereas, social, political and collective empowerment are high among non-entrepreneurs.