The Challenges and Issues of Tribal Women Labourers Participation in Rural Development Activities: A Sociological Study

Sociology, Development Studies, Indigenous Knowledge System, Tribal Studies, Gender Studies

Recent women development studies increasingly showed that rural women were the poorest of poor often trapped in conditions that lift them in worse off circumstances then their compatriots. Amidst the past half a century of national development efforts, women continued to be the single largest group of backward Citizens suffering double discrimination. The poverty induced cycle affected all people but made the hardest impact on women and girls. Conditions were not created for the improvement of poor rural women, who were viewed as recipients of marginal social welfare. It was in this backdrop the special recognition was given during the Sixth Five Year Plan emphasizing the need to open a new avenue of work for rural women for increasing their productivity and bringing them into the economic mainstream as useful and productive human beings. The plan also perceived them as a crucial resource for the development of the country. It was also realized that any process of development or resolve to wage an outright war against age-old problems of poverty, ignorance and backwardness, caring little for the uplift of somewhat half of population of women was bound to be less effective in arriving at solutions. Women must put their shoulder to the wheel if the nation wanted to march forward. Thus organizing of women groups was considered to be one of the most effective tools for integrating rural women in the development process. The present study would contribute to understand the Structural condition that had shaped the rural tribal women of the district and also the implications in organizing grass roots tribal women for change in rural Community. This would also manifest how much the work in the case of grass root tribal women, who faced different Social and economic Conditions and had fewer resources available to build organization and to change their economic Condition, was Confronted with the multiplicity of interrelated issues.

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