Women Empowerment is the ability of women to exercise full control over their actions. This means control over
material assets, intellectual resources and even over their ideologies. It involves, at the psychological level, women's
ability to assert them which has, so far, been constricted by the 'gender roles' assigned to them especially in a culture
like India which resists changes.
Women empowerment is a prerequisite to gender equality and development. The process of empowerment should
start from our own home. Women’s position in the household determines women’s autonomy in the family. It is
worth to examine whether women can decide about household matters like buying jewelries, having access to
money, having mobility to go to market or relatives house or getting health care facilities. In this paper we have
found the state wise variations in the percentages of women who are involved in the household decision making
power and have examined whether levels of education, types of occupation, working status of women etc., and the
other characteristics of the household like standard of living, sex of head of household etc. have positive influence on
the empowerment. Data from NFHS-2 Survey conducted in 1998-99 have been used for the analysis. The degree of
women’s decision making power is not same over the different aspects of life considered here. Women are almost the
sole authority to decide about cooking and have access to money but can rarely buy jewelry of its own. Less than
one-third of women can decide about health care or get permission to go to relatives house or market. The
empowerment of women increases with the age of women and remains almost same among different occupational
groups. Husband’s education or occupation does not contribute much to the empowerment. Working women have
distinct advantage as against non-working or unpaid working women. Though maximum percentage of empowered
women has been observed about cooking but its nature is different from others. Unlike others, this percentage
decreases as SLI increases, is less for literate women and female headed households. This paper throws light upon
the different challenges that are faced by Indian Women and why there is still need for their empowerment. It will
also focus on the efforts made by Government for empowerment of women.