Promoting Women Empowerment and Gender Equality through the Right To Decent Work: Implementation of National Rural Employment Guarantee Program (NREGP) in Assam State (India) – A Case Study

The gendered distribution of assets and the resultant fallout on women substantially limits national efforts at overcoming poverty, thus indicating the urgent need for addressing issues relating to persistent gender discrimination and factors affecting women’s ownership and control of assets. The primary objective of the research is to study the impact of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Program (India) on women empowerment and gender inequality and to identify major constraints, if any, on women’s access to productive employment opportunities through the employment guarantee program. The material presented here is basically the outcome of the researcher’s field work in Assam. The paper focuses on the female workers in two selected districts of assam to derive conclusions to highlight the impact of the program on the lives of women workers and gender relations. Significant benefit reported by the study includes, income gain, social empowerment, more say in intra-household decision making and creation of community assets etc. The paper ends up by identifying certain barriers to women’s access to NREGA and important learning lesson for policy.