Role of Micro and Small Scale Enterprises in Women Empowerment in India A Case Study of National Capital Region

Abstract

Women have a substantial share of 48.5% in population base and 25.5% in labour force of the country, according to census of India 2011. In order to bring about women empowerment in all the spheres, government of India declared 2001, as the year of Women Empowerment. Micro and small scale enterprises have played a fundamental role in structural transformation of India in the past decades. The present study adopts ME framework in order to measure women empowerment. Decision making at family level and at workplace, freedom to express ideas and absence of competitive envy at workplace, are taken as parameters of women empowerment. The independent variables taken in the study are in the form of asset endowments. For the study, both primary and secondary data sources are used. Primary data is collected from 400 working women of formal micro and small scale enterprises in National Capital region. The secondary sources of data involve annual reports of micro, small and medium enterprises, census of India reports, industrial profiles of NCT Delhi, Gautam Budh Nagar and Ghaziabad. For analysing the data, the software, Stata is used. Binary Logistic regression is used in order to examine the empowerment status of working women of formal micro and small enterprises. The results show that income generation, educational attainment and on-the-job training are robust variables in impacting decision making power of women employees at workplace. Years of experience play a significant role in upgrading decision making power of working women at their family level and access to information significantly affects freedom to express ideas and absence of competitive envy at workplace. As such, the study highlights the need to give importance to a mix of indicators which affect parameters of women empowerment significantly. Hence, for a holistic improvement in empowerment status of women emphasis must be laid on different explanatory indicators. newline