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Fuzziness in conceptualisation of women’s empowerment, access to resources and autonomy: evidence from Indian states

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Abstract

Empowerment is instrumentally important for achieving positive development outcomes and well-being of life which lies in the doing and being what one values and have reason to value, i.e. agency. Sen made a strong claim for increasing the agency of the individual to enable them to be an effective agent of their own well-being and development. The concept of empowerment is very complex in itself, indeed very fuzzy also. Different scholars hold different definition of empowerment according to the need of their work. Women’s agency, autonomy and empowerment are widely used idea in development literature and capability approach. But there exists substantial ambiguity in conception of these ideas. While women’s well-being and women’s agency is sufficiently distinguished from each other, there seems to be a large overlap between agency and empowerment and between agency and autonomy. The present paper examines various conceptions of these ideas to clearly mark the overlapping zones and distinguishing features of respective concepts. It is shown that operationalisation of these concepts in empirical research covering all states of India is quite difficult and given the limitation of data sources only some dimensions of empowerment can be empirically tested at all India level. This paper uses NFHS-3 data set to do so. The second part of the paper carries out empirical testing of indicators of access to resources and autonomy for major 15 states of India and shows that access to resources and autonomy are not necessarily coterminous.

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Notes

  1. These 15 major states account for almost 70% population of India.

  2. It suggests that this question may not have been put properly to have an objective answer.

  3. Thresh hold line has been calculated using the technique of displaced ideal. Simply speaking, this line is index of national average, based on DI method.

  4. Better access to resources may be an outcome of better or progressive governance without activation of agency role of women. A case in point is deposit mobilisation or credit availability. The percentage of population with saving or credit account is higher in southern states and lowers in north eastern states. That means access to credit is better in former than the latter (See, Rakesh Mohan, RBI, IDBI GILTS Ltd). Similarly, GER of women graduates for year 2004–2005 is generally higher than national average for southern states and lower for eastern states (See, University Grants Commission: Higher Education in India, Issues Related to Expansion, Inclusiveness, Quality and Finance, 2008) Therefore, women from south may be thought of as having better access to resources. But this better access to credit or education is largely a result of welfare policies of respective state governments, rather than being a demand driven phenomena. That is why it has only marginal role in enhancing women’s agency and it fails to reflect into improvement in women’s empowerment, i.e., if we look at this in terms of outcome only, neglecting processes involved therein, we are likely to construe this as improvement in access to resources and therefore likely to be an improvement in women’s empowerment. This is definitely a wrong interpretation of empowerment. At most it can be an improvement in well-being only.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Demographic and Health surveys (DHS) for providing unit record data of NFHS-3 of India for this paper. An earlier version of this paper was selected for presentation in International conference of Human Development and Capabilities Association, 2009 at Lima, Peru. The preliminary draft of this paper was presented at winter school 2011 organised by Delhi School of Economics. We are also thankful to participants and organisers as the paper stands benefitted by comments received at said school.

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  1. CSEP/SSS, Central University of Gujarat, Sector-29, Gandhinagar, India

    Tulika Tripathi

  2. Department of Economics, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India

    Nripendra K. Mishra

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  1. Tulika Tripathi
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  2. Nripendra K. Mishra
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Correspondence to Tulika Tripathi.

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Tripathi, T., Mishra, N.K. Fuzziness in conceptualisation of women’s empowerment, access to resources and autonomy: evidence from Indian states. J. Soc. Econ. Dev. 19, 60–82 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40847-017-0043-1

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