Empowerment and Entitlement of Rural Women in the Panchayat System
Contents: Preface. About the author. About the book. 1. Prologue. 2. The perspective and context of Women\'s participation in Panchayat System: the referral and illustration. 3. Women\'s participation in Panchayat: The people, setting and methodology. 4. Women and Panchayat: the power, access and participation. 5. Epilogue. References. Subject index.
"India\'s Panchayat Raj System is the world\'s largest democratic structure through which rural development and progress are being organized and spear headed with the active participation of down to earth people. The institutionalization processes of Panchayat it self has drawn the attention of world intellectual and scholars for its unique pattern of socialization, evolution and functioning across the decade. While at the earlier stage of its initiation (1960-1980), this institution has been suffering from the lack of clear vision in how to imbibe the interest and spirit of huge have not of our society and how to make disparaging gender distances minimized one, in the way of its gradual growth, the 73 and 74 Amendment have made great break through by ushering the women\'s participation and backward communities involvement for their main streaming in the process of rural development. The whole of the process has presented to the intellectuals, scholars and professionals of social and management science, a whole lot of social chemistry for successfully organizing the much needed development endeavors.
The book is coming out at such a point of time when our parliament has unleashed the Women Reservation Bill and when the entire nation is being stormed with the 100 days job guarantee programme where in women participation is having a stark. West Bengal again is one of the pioneer states implementing the various rural development programmes with both blistering success and some failure having learning experiences. And both of these success and learning experiences, internationally acknowledged, have become the socio-political construct of this book.
Books of Panchayat are not that dearer. But a book on methodology and operational approaches to study women participation from a kaleidoscopic vision enriched with battery of unique variables covering social, political, economic, management characters, is of course that dearer.
The content of the book derived from rich empirical studies would give a fillip to the refreshing minds of scholars, professionals, scientists, management personnels, policy makers, institute for sustainable rural development and of course that of political leaders committed to the cause of rural development. With the burgeoning demand on rural development studies, this book is no doubt a time felt intellectual as well as emotional intervention." (jacket)
