Authored by:

Rameez M Sydeek
Dept. of Physics
AMU, Aligarh
Co-authored by:
Syed Jafar Mustafa
Dept. of Physics
AMU, Aligarh

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the current and previous attempts to systematically measureand
collect data onthe scope and nature of (political, administrative, and fiscal) decentralization in India.
Through this paper we are exploring the fact that India as a developing country interacts with the people
through devolved or non-devolved approaches. There are current efforts to measure local public sector
finances considering any non-devolved decentralised financing mechanisms, such as deconcentration or
delegation. This void in the data with regard to decentralization provides policy makers and the research
community with a considerably incomplete patchwork of information regarding decentralization, rather
than resulting in a single, consistent, and robust dataset regarding the depth and breadth of decentralization
in states across India.
This paper also deals with empowerment of women in India and throws light on particularly agency
approach to measure women empowerment. Here we present the illustration of modern approach to
empowerment and an overview of the efforts put in India for empowering women. Using data from The
Global Gender Gap Report of the past few years, we measure the level of women empowerment in India.
Empowerment takes into account not only both the practical and strategic gender needs of women but also
recognizes their triple role in development. In doing so it follows a bottom-up approach. Empowerment has
a number of dimensions with political participation as being one of them. Womens political presence and
empowerment have some obvious links. Women can influence the formulation of policies affecting other
women in society. Decentralization provides greater opportunities for the citizen to participation in
governance at the local level and hence could be a good policy option for enhancing womens political
participation. It does so by increasing descriptive representation of women, which in turn leads to womens
responsive policies.

Keywords: Women, empowerment, decentralization, development, political, gender, equality, government,

India, amendment, Panchayats.

Introduction:
According to Rondineli decentralization is "the transfer of responsibility for planning, management and
resource raising and allocation from the central government and its agencies to: (a) the field units of central
government and its agencies, (b) subordinate units or level of government, (c) semiautonomous public
authorities or corporations, (d) area wide, regional or functional authorities (e) nongovernmental private or
voluntary organisations" (Rondineli 1981a). And Mawhood defines decentralization as "any act in which a
central government formally cedes powers to actors and institutions at lower levels in a politicaladministrative and territorial hierarchy"(Mawhood 1983). The concept of empowerment traces its history
in the mid-17th century with the legalistic meaning to invest with authority. Thereafter, this concept was
modernized to mean to enable or permit. After 1980s, the novel concept of measuring economic
development through human development focusing on political empowerment linkage with feminist
discourse went a long way in shaping the idea of womens empowerment. During 1990s economists
argued that development if not engendered, is endangered and the major component of the global society
i.e. women are left outside the purview of the fruits of development and planning, we cannot achieve the
desired goal of a developed status of an economy, whether it is developed or developing. The United
Nations has shown concern for women empowerment evident in Millennium Development Goals to trace
the progress of women empowerment across the world.

Types of Decentralization:

The types of decentralization (political, administrative, fiscal and market decentralization) mainly depend
on the political and administrative structure of any particular country(Neven).Forms of decentralization can
be classified into four categories like deconcentration, delegation, devolution and privatization (Rondineli,
1983a). Manor (1999) argues that decentralization should be categorized into three aspects such as
deconcentration or administrative decentralization, fiscal decentralization and devolution or democratic
decentralization. It is really important to make a clear distinction between these aspects for bringing
smooth coordination among the different dimensions of the successful decentralization. Major types of
decentralization are given below.

Political decentralization
Political decentralization is defined as the process of transferring political power and authority from central
government to sub-national level of government. The political decentralization is amongst the most
transparent and accountable from of decentralization. Political decentralization indicates few groups at
central, state and local government which are capable of taking decisions and actions for the society. Its
main aim is to provide more empowerment elected representatives or to the citizens for massive public
welfare.

Administrative decentralization
Administrative decentralization means transferring specific administrative responsibilities to lower levels
within the central governmental ministries and agencies (Rondineli, 1981a). It is associated with the
redistribution of authority, responsibilities and financial resources for giving public services between
diverse levels of government. It works with shifting power including planning, financial and managerial
powers of assured public functions from central government within its agencies to field units of
government agencies, sub-ordinate levels of government, semi-autonomies public corporations or areawide, regional or functional authorities. It is of three major types- deconcentration, delegation and
devolution.
According to Rondineli, Deconcentration involves the transfer of specific administrative responsibilities
to lower levels within the central government ministries and agencies (Rondineli, 1981a). Manor describes
it as the dispersal of agents of higher levels of government into lower-level arenas and emphasizes that
deconcentration and democratization should occur simultaneously.
Delegation involves the redistribution of authority and responsibility from central governments to state and
local level of governments or agencies where the volume of accountability remains to central agencies
(Work 2002). The term delegation can be described as the way of transferring public functions from the
regular political-administrative structure to lower units of governments, public corporations or semi
autonomous bodies or any other authorities with a view to accomplishing programs on behalf of the central
government.
Devolution is the process of delegating powers and resources to lower level of authorities from central
agencies. Representatives of local bodies enjoy extensive decision making power and also have to be
accountable for its activities to the local populations. The central government has little or no control upon
local authorities and lower levels are fully independent (Manor, 1999).One of the most important features
of devolution is election. The local people elect their representatives through secret ballots. Direct and
indirect election can be held to elect candidates (Manor 1997).

Fiscal decentralization
Fiscal decentralization comprises the financial aspects of devolution to regional and local government. It is
the currently fashionable term; the alternative descriptions "central-local (or intergovernmental) financial
relations" and "fiscal federalism" are often used by European and American writers respectively. Fiscal
decentralization covers two interrelated issues. The first is the division of spending responsibilities and
revenue sources between levels of government (national, regional, local etc). The second is the amount of
discretion given to regional and local governments to determine their expenditures and revenues (both in
aggregate and detail).These combined dimensions have a significant impact on the reality of
decentralization in its broader political and administrative sense.

Types of Woman Empowerment:

Empowerment can have six components: Cognitive, Psychological, Economic, Political, Social and
Legal.
According to Nelly Stromquist (1993), the Cognitive Component means women are understanding their
conditions of subordination and the causes of such conditions are at both micro and macro levels of
society. It involves acquiring new knowledge to create a different understanding of gender relations as well
as destroying old beliefs that structure powerful gender ideologies.
The Psychological Component, on the other hand, would include the development of feelings that
women can act upon to improve their condition. This means formation of the belief that they can succeed
in change efforts.
The Economic Component requires that women can be able to engage in a productive activity that will
allow them some degree of autonomy, no matter how small and hard to obtain at the beginning. Education
is considered one of the most important means to empower women with the knowledge, skills and selfconfidence necessary to participate fully in development processes.
The Political Component would encompass the ability to organize and mobilize for change.
Consequently, an empowerment process must involve not only individual awareness but collective
awareness and collective action. The notion of collective action is fundamental to the aim of attaining
social transformation (Stromquist). In past role of woman in politics is mere but now the scenario is
different. A good percentage i.e. nearly above 33% are participating. Encouraging them to participate in
community programmes, integration of women in the general national development plan, allotting them
good portfolio's like education, health, sanitary that motivates them to do good practices. It is clear that
women can be empowered individually; the feminist vision is one where women are able to articulate as a
collective voice and demonstrate collective strength. It was also stressed that incorporating the feminist
perspective in the concept of empowerment implies a long-term re-designing of societies that will be based
on democratic relationships.
Social Empowerment is a process to change the distribution of power in interpersonal relations among
different people, cultures, and activities of the society. In past awareness regarding the society is unknown
to the women but present scenario reveals completely different pictures and knows they are equally
participating in all activities of the society. Best references are our Ex President Mrs. Pratibha Patel and
Hillary Clinton. All efforts must be mobilized to enable at least the next generation to be genuinely literate
to empower socially.
Talking about Legal Empowerment. Protection is needed for the women in terms of health, harassments,
superstitions, cultural barriers etc. Child marriages, sati etc are some of the oldest traditions, which are the

basic barriers for a girls development. But now there are no such obsolete traditions to be in practice.
Make them aware of the civil rights, exercising the legal rights whenever necessary, preparing and
canvassing the documents regarding the legal freedom for women, providing good literary programmes
regarding the legal empowerment which will all help a long way towards achieving this goal.

The Modern Approach to women empowerment:

In recent years the concept of empowerment was modified to include the power in plural form as
powers. This powers approach was picked up by several feminist bodies and development NGOs which
have argued that empowerment process should be broken down in four levels of power power over,
power to, power with and power within. A revised definition of poverty during the reforms period brought
out a new dimension of empowerment. Haschemi and Schuler (1993) have identified six dimensions of
empowerment based on activities of women identified as important for their day-to-day functioning. The
concept Poverty was also redefined as lack of real opportunity and ultimately a matter of capability
deprivation. Hence, it was argued that the basic objective of development was the expansion of human
capabilities (Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, 1995). It was also argued that expansion of human capabilities
empowers the people and facilitates the reduction of social and economic inequalities. Attempts were made
to separate the gender and economic components of empowerment by combining the models of
empowerment proposed by Kabeer (1999) and England (2000). Kabeer (1999) identified three main
elements of empowerment: The first one is the preconditions of empowerment which include economic as
well as human and social resources. The second one is achievements. Gender norms and economic
resources must act as preconditions to exercise the power that positively affects the demographic outcomes
and also to have an independent influence on these achievements. Malhotra et.al. (2002) used the
definition of empowerment suggested by Kabeer (1999) and argued that empowerment is the expansion of
peoples ability to make strategic life choices in a context where this ability was previously denied to
them. To be precise, it could be said that to be empowered means to exercise more power than other
women in the same context. Based on these arguments, efforts were made to build models that separate the
gender and economic components of empowerment proposed by Kabeer (1999) and England (2000) as
shown in Fig. 1.

Fig.1: Conceptual Model of Gender and Women Empowerment

Source: Jill Williams (2005) Measuring Gender and Womens Empowerment Using Confirmatory Factor
Analysis, IBS Working Paper, PAC- 2005-01.
Fig 1 shows the conceptualization of empowerment for measurement and uses an oval to indicate the latent
nature of the gender system. Gender norms become obvious and measurable when women break them.

Figure 2 also shows that empowerment is demonstrated by a relative lack of adherence to gender norms.
Gender, then, is the system of expectations that underlie womens observable behaviours. Womens
empowerment can then be measured as womens relative level of adherence to gender norms. This
conceptual model of gender and empowerment makes it possible to measure womens empowerment with
cross-sectional data. Furthermore, the gender system, or the gender component of womens empowerment,
can be measured using statistical techniques for latent variables such as confirmatory factor analysis. The
next sections describe how to specify a theoretical model of the gender system, how to use confirmatory
factor analysis to test the model using survey data, and then how to construct measures of gender and
womens empowerment from the confirmatory factor analysis output.
Of late, the Human Development Reports have been emphasizing on thinking about equality in terms of
capabilities because inequalities in outcomes are largely the product of unequal access to capabilities. The
Human Development Reports have introduced Gender Related Development Index (GDI) (to measure
average achievements in long and healthy life, knowledge and a decent standard of living which account
for inequalities between men and women). Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) (which measures
gender inequality) and Gender Inequality Index (GII) (which measures the losses due to gender inequalities
in reproductive health, empowerment and labour market participation). The Human Development Report
-2010 observed that human development is a participatory and dynamic process and people are the real
wealth of a nation and the process has three important components viz., well-being, empowerment and
agency and justice (equality). Particularly it was stressed that empowerment requires both agency and
supportive institutional structures and empowerment is about people as individuals and acting in groups.
The World Development Report-2012 observed that greater gender equality enhances productivity,
improves development outcomes for the next generation and make institutions more representative. The
United Nation Population Fund (2003) believed that gender inequality holds back economic growth of
individuals, development of countries and the evolution of societies and economic growth and social
equality should go hand in hand. The World Economic Forum has been publishing The Global Gender Gap
reports since 2006 and its reports focused on three basic concepts underlying the Global Gender Gap Index.
First, it focused on measuring the gaps between men and women rather than on levels. Second, it captured
gaps in outcome variables rather than on gaps in means or input variables. Third, it ranked countries
according to gender equality rather than women empowerment.

The 73rd Constitutional Amendment and Empowerment of Rural Women

The 73rd Constitutional Amendment has served as the institutional breakthrough towards ensuring equal
access to and enhanced participation of rural women in the inclusive development through the participation
of women in the local government at grassroot level. The Amendment Bill, providing a constitutional status
to the Panchayati Raj institutions, was passed by both Houses of Parliament in December 1992. Following
its ratification by more than half the state Assemblies as required under the Constitution, the President of
India gave his assent, and the same came into force as the Constitutional (73rd Amendment) Act, 1992 on
April 24, 1993, adding a new part to the Constitution, namely, Part IX titled The Panchayats. The
73rd Constitutional Amendment provided the following provisions among others:
(1) Not less than of the one third of the total number of seats reserved for the Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes in every Panchayat shall be reserved for women belonging to the Scheduled Castes or as
the case may be, Scheduled Tribes.
(2) Not less than one third (including the number of seats reserved for women belonging to the Scheduled
Castes and Scheduled Tribes) of the total seats to be filled by the direct election in every Panchayat shall be
reserved for the women and allotted by rotation to different constituencies in a Panchayat.

(3) The Act also provides for reservation of one third of the total number of offices of chairpersons in the
Panchayats at all levels for women including women from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
This provision of one-third reservation for women is indeed a historic step, as it guaranteed representation
and participation for women as group in Panchayats. The Constitutional Amendment has indeed provided
the women with opportunity to involve in the overall socio-economic development of village, through the
political participation. It is not, however, that there are any inadequacies, handicaps, constraints and
difficulties. A closer look at the factors contributing to effective role performance of elected women in the
Panchayati Raj Institutions turns out to be the encouragement effecting from family members, villagers and
sound knowledge of Panchayats (Gowda, 1998, 677). Thus, on the contrary, absence of this encouragement
and inadequate opportunities to women members resulting from male dominance and male indifference to
their views can prevent them from performing their role effectively.

Empowerment of Women in India

According to Census-2011, India has reached the population of 1210 million, as against 301 million in
1951, of which 58,64,69,174 (48.5 %) were females. The population of India accounted for 17.5% of the
total world population and occupied second place. The sex ratio was 930 in 1971 and it has increased to
940 according to 2011 Census. The female literacy also increased from 18.3% in 1961 to 74.0% in 2011
and a decrease in male-female literacy gap from 26.6% in 1981 to 16.7 per cent in 2011. It can be
highlighted that Kerala and Mizoram have the highest female literacy rate of 92% and 89% respectively.
Women empowerment in India is heavily dependent on many different variables that include geographical
location (rural/urban), educational status, social status (caste and class) and age. Policies on women
empowerment exist at national, state and local levels in many sectors including health, education,
economic opportunities, gender based violence and political participation. The scope and coverage of the
schemes launched has been expanding that include initiatives for economic and social empowerment of
women and for securing gender equality. The following schemes at present are aiming at women
empowerment and gender equality in India:
1. Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) (1975)
2. Rajiv Gandhi Scheme for Empowerment of Adolescent Girls (RGSEAG) (2010)
3. The Rajiv Gandhi National Crche Scheme for Children of Working Mothers.
4. Integrated Child Protection Scheme (ICPS) (2009-10)
5. Support to Training and Employment Programme for Women (STEP)
6. Dhanalakshmi (2008)
7. Short Stay Homes
8. Swadhar
9. Ujjawala (2007)
10. Scheme for Gender Budgeting (XI Plan)
11. National Mission for Empowerment of Women
12. Rashtriya Mahila Kosh (1993)

In spite of the effective implementation of all the above schemes and programmes, there are significant
gaps between policy achievements and actual practice at the community level. The Global Gender Gap
Index (2012) observed that India is simply not doing enough for its women. The ranking of the country has
remained the same i.e 113 (out of 134 countries) in 2010 and (out of 135 countries) in 2011. However, in
2012, its ranking has improved from 113 in 2011 to 105 (out of 135 countries) with a score of 0.644. Again
in 2013, it improved from 105 to 101(out of 136 countries) with a score of 0.655.But according to latest
report of 2014, unfortunately the ranking has gone down to 114(out of 142 countries) with a score of 0.646.

Fig 2: Comparison of Indias GGI scores of 2014 with the past 8 years scores.
Source: Global Gender Gap Index 2014.

Fig 3: Indias scorecard of The Global Gender Gap Report 2014

Source: The Global Gender Gap Report 2014
The above report has observed that the persistent health, education and economic participation gaps are
acting as detrimental forces to Indias growth. The disproportionate sex ratio at birth has not changed over
the past years (WEF, 2014).

The linkage between Decentralization and Women Empowerment

As has been mentioned earlier that approaches to womens empowerment or say dimensions are several
with political participation as being one of them. Political participation can help women to empower in a
number of ways. For example, it can help them to achieve an equitable representation in decision-making
structures, both formal and informal. In doing so, they can influence the formulation of policies affecting
their societies. Absence of women from the structures of governance would mean that policies designed at
the national, regional and local levels for the allocation of resources etc. would lack input from women.
Such policies can only benefit men, thus making women more marginalized. Women empowerment thus
depends to a great extent on the level of their participation in politics. Hence it is agreed upon to some
extent that political presence and empowerment have important links, the question now is what can help
increase political participation? Democratic decentralization can be a good policy approach in this regard
because it is about good governance, about providing greater opportunities for citizens participation in
governance at the local level. It can be useful in empowering women in a number of ways e.g. it can
increase the descriptive representation of women in local governments and at the same time it can help in
the formulation womens responsive policies. Figure 4, is an illustration of how decentralization may to

lead to women empowerment. It is obvious from the figure that decentralization may enhance women
descriptive representation in politics. The enhanced descriptive representation may have profound impacts
on the policies designed at the local as well as regional levels. Thus, it is most probable that the policies
designed may be more responsive women needs. Consequently, both the women descriptive representation
as well as the women responsive policies may ultimately lead to their empowerment.

Fig4: Showing the possible link between decentralization and womens empowerment
Source: Self Designed

Conclusion:
The forgoing discussion amply reveals that though the concepts empowerment, agency and autonomy
have been used interchangeably, in practice it is found that they can substantially diverge from each other
and are may not reflect into the other. This divergence tells us that there is a need for identification of some
cultural factors having bearing on empowerment and autonomy. There is a need to understand that the
concepts of empowerment and autonomy are sufficiently different. As the data presented in the above
tables exhibited, still a large part of women do not have sufficient autonomy regarding the value choices for
their own life. The data also makes us to infer that there is a necessity to look beyond economic resources
or material prosperity and into cultural and social influences, which are playing a significant role in
shaping the womens autonomy and agency. Again, it is also true that though not the womens
empowerment and autonomy have a link with womens access to resources or material well-being, it is to
be accepted that there is a variety of potential connections and there exists various forms of linkages among
these variables. Hence, the answer for the question Are women really empowered in India is nothing but
not yet to the desired level.

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