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European Journal of Business &

Social Sciences

Available at https://ejbss.org/

ISSN: 2235-767X

Volume 07 Issue 01

January 2019

Available online:https://ejbss.org/ P a g e | 437

Dropout rates for girls have fallen by 16.5% between the year 2000 and 2005. Programs like

‘Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’ and ‘Saakshar Bharat Mission for Female Literacy’ has helped increase

the literacy rates from less than 10 percent to more than 50% today. The result of this is that

India has world’s largest number of professionally qualified women. In fact India has the largest

population of working women in the world, and has more number of doctors, surgeons,

scientists, professors than the United States.

Women in India slowly started recognising her true potential. She has started questioning the

rules laid down for her by the society. As a result, she has started breaking barriers and earned a

respectable position in the world. Today Indian women have excelled in each and every field

from social work to visiting space station. There is no arena, which remains unconquered by

Indian women. Whether it is politics, sports, entertainment, literature, technology everywhere, its

women power all along.

Today names like Arundhati Roy, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Shobhaa De, Jhumpa Lahiri can put

any other writer to shame. In the field of cinema, women like Rekha, Smita Patil, Shabana

Aazmi and Vidya Balan and Konkona Sen are such names who don’t play feminised roles, but

have asserted themselves over this male-dominated realm. In the field of Politics, from Indira

Gandhi to Shiela Dixit, Uma Bharti, Jayalalithaa, Vasundhra Raje and Mamata Banerjee today,

women are making their presence felt.

Today, the modern woman is so deft and self-sufficient that she can be easily called a

superwoman, juggling many fronts single-handedly. Women are now fiercely ambitious and are

proving their metal not only on the home front, but also in their respective professions. Women

in Indian are coming up in all spheres of life. They are joining the universities and colleges in

large numbers. They are entering into all kinds of professions like engineering, medicine,

politics, teaching, etc. A nation’s progress and prosperity can be judged by the way it treats its

women folk. There is a slow and steady awareness regarding giving the women their dues, and

not mistreating them, seeing them as objects of possession. Despite progress, the very fact that

women, along with being achievers, also are expected to fulfil their roles as wives or mothers,

prioritising home against anything else.

This point of view hasn’t changed much. There is still a large section of women who are

uneducated, and married off before the age of 18. Families are required to supply a chaste

daughter to the family of her future husband. Also very few women are actually employed in

good-paying jobs, and hence parents don’t see the point of spending money on girls’ education.

Statistics say that close to 245 million Indian women lack the basic capability to read and write,

which is a large number. Only 13.9% women are employed in the urban sector, and 29% in the

domestic and agriculture sector, where too a majority of women are exploited by the men. The

sex ratio of India shows that the Indian society is still prejudiced against female, and a lot is yet

to be achieved in this context.

The path towards total gender empowerment is full of potholes. Over the years, women have

made great strides in many areas with notable progress in reducing some gender gaps. Yet