As per Indian culture, women are treated and greeted as equivalent to Goddess. There is a famous sloka in Sanskrit “Yatra nāryastu pūjyante ramante tatra devatāh | Yatraitāstu na pūjyante sarvāstatrāphalā kriyā: ||” means where women are honored, divinity blossoms there. With this view if we look into our country's progression, we will end up with dissatisfaction because the most ubiquitous and enduring type of inequality in society continues to be gender disparity, discrimination in enjoying the fundamental rights, lack of empowerment, etc. Such issues can be dealt with if the women in the country work at par with men for economic development. The evolution of microfinance has brought a drastic change in this outlook and helped the economy to overcome the issues and challenges of empowerment. Microfinance, through its successful model of Self Help Group (SHG), has reached every nook and corner of the country to address the issues of empowerment, specially and particularly focusing on women empowerment. SHG model of microfinance has succeeded in its goal of reaching the grass root level for empowering the women, which in turn, helps the economic progression. Economic empowerment of women brings financial stability and change in the standard of living of people, particularly in rural areas. SHGs serve as an effective tool for economic empowerment of women through various capacity building training programmes, thus focusing on skill enhancement for income creation through self-employability. This paper tries to evaluate the impact of SHGs towards the economic empowerment of women. The result and discussion of the study reveals that membership in SHGs has helped women, especially vulnerable women to gain empowerment.
KEYWORDS: Women, Economic Empowerment, Self Help Group (SHG), Economic Development.
