Authors : Prerana Ratnaparkhi
Page Nos : 262-275
Description :
Women are a great human resource and the role of women in society is absolutely vital for its progress. According to UN (2005), ICTs can be a powerful catalyst for the political and social women empowerment and the promotion of gender equality. In the new era of globalization have widened the gap between education and technology opportunities for men and women. It has great significance for a country like India where majority of the population, around 65% of the people, live in rural areas. Literacy is an important factor on the basis of which ICT can be bought in rural areas. In this paper the study based on secondary data which is retrieved from United Nation Development Programme (UNDP 2010) studies on the terminal evaluation of Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) project in India since 2004 for the progress of rural women in ICT. In Asia, some of the ICT initiatives have been playing a vital role for deprived and empowering rural women. A different perspective of women depicted that most of these ventures have remained as “projects†of someone else than becoming their own „initiatives‟ Though in these initiative women had greater access to the ICT tools than men. These tools hardly cater to the developmental need of the illiterate rural women who have a long way to move forward in the process of development. In this context, the present study has attempted to study some of the outstanding technological initiatives that have significantly contributed for the women empowerment in rural India. An attempt has been made in this paper to explore women‟s empowerment through ICTs in rural areas by IT sector. Keywords : ICT, Rural Women, IT Sector
