Women Empowerment and Development: Readings from Asia

Contents: 1. Women s development and empowerment/Sameera Maiti. 2. Gender and development -issues in Japan/Yoko Fujikake. 3. Study on 'Gendered Membership' in China's new urbanization reform/Wang Xiaoli and Zhang Chao. 4. Concession in stamp duty/Saroj Arora and Prem Singh. 5. Hand embroidery as a tool of empowering rural women of Punjab/Anu H. Gupta and Shalina Mehta. 6. Implications of rural tourism to Chinese rural women's subjective well-being/Xiang Yixiao and Dong Isbister. 7. Tribal cultural traditions and women empowerment in natural resource management/Debashis Debnath. 8. Empowering tribal women through livelihood opportunity/Chinmayee Satpathy. 9. Changing scenario of women empowerment and political awareness among Gond tribe of India/Bhawna. 10. Narratives of Himalayan Annies/Swati Akshay Sachdeva and Winnie Bothe. 11. Understanding learning disability/Richa Chowdhary. The need for absolute gender equality is now a universally acknowledged guiding principle for policy makers and international bodies. In recent years, concepts like WAD (Women and Development) and GAD (Gender and Development) have gained increasing traction, with appropriate responses from policy planners. However, a great gap still exists between policies and practice, as is evident from the several papers included in the current volume. Lack of gender equality and equity is all pervasive as illustrated by case studies in this book whether it be in China s megacities or its rural countryside, inequalities exist in societies as diverse as those of Himalayan ascetics to the tribal forests and badlands in Central India and Odisha, from the fertile plains of Punjab to materially developed Japan. The papers also discuss policy implications contributing to women s development and empowerment in a variety of settings, and argue for active state policies for women s development and empowerment.…