Participation in the workforce can be empowering for women in a number of ways, providing them independent earning, new skills and exposure to the outside world and also structure of the authority. However, men reports higher work participation than women in India.

According to Indian National Sample Survey, man labor force participation stood at 85 percent while female’s at 35 percent in India. This is also true that in most part of the world, the women have secondary position and the responsibility of bread earning is on the man. However, the most of the Indian women are working belong to lower strata of the society.

The male labor force in agriculture has declined; this has increased the house hold as well as agriculture burden on the rural Indian women. A large number of women are occupied as in the domestic help and household production, but to calculate their contribution as in the tangible income source is a complex issue. According the Human Development Report, 1995, there is hardly any difference between the women in developing countries and developed countries in term of number of hour and total number of work. In developing countries, this share is 53% and in developed or industrialized countries their share is 51%. Although, this comparison is just to show the situation of women at global stage.

Currently, the women have a large participation in sectors of the economy not officially labeled as ‘work’ such as participation in the non monetized sector and assisting with family based or house hold based economic activity; this nature of work is not reflected in the national accounting scheme.

Furthermore, a number of factors impede women’s entry into the workforce, such as social security for women workers, including maternity benefits, Medicare, accident compensation and occupational safety measures are virtually nonexistent. The most of the employment related benefits go to workers in the organized sectors, generally, educated urban male and female get these benefit. The job opportunity in the organized sector limits the involvement of even the functional literate women in the workforce.

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), a innovative employment scheme in the rural India, which strengthen the equity and inclusiveness in workforce in India. In recently held international conference on NREGS, a paper presented by Jayati Ghosh shows that the women’s share in total rural workforce in India is 36.2 percent, while in women’s share in total workforce under NREGS is 48.9 percent.

The involvement of marginalized women belonging to scheduled caste and tribe is spectacular in NREGS. But, in the social spectrum, the women’s outside work are also constructed on the basis of gender role. In many poverty ridden rural household, this has been observed that as soon her son or husband start earning, he discourages his mother or wife to work outside. The high level of involvement of women from marginalized castes and group is also providing substantial support that the poverty among this section of social group is quite acute and worse in form.

The NREGS has been critically evaluated on the basis of productive utility and creative utilization of program. The implementation of this program is quite challenging, this is not because of the faulty nature but the lack of institutional effectiveness and also of the effective mechanism. The nature of the program is going to make its base in addressing many social economic issues in the rural areas.

The productive utility is creating at least the 100 days exposure to the rural women and they are able to meet the other women of the same villages. In the normal day to day life, this kind of exposure possibility is highly rare. While working in this program would enable them to interact with many policy issues and also with their political representative. Although, this is little ambitious to discuss this possibility but the NREGS creates opportunity of this nature for the rural women. As far as creative utilization of the resource is amazing suggestion, but the creativity and innovation comes quite lately or never comes in the life of rural women. The sole objective of the rural women with this program to get some cash and kind benefit, while working within their own village.

The 73^rd and 74^th Constitutional Amendments, passed in 1993, decentralized state government and allotted power to local Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs). The same amendment reserved one third of seats for women in local government bodies, as well as made additional reservation for other marginalized groups. There remain a number of challenges in ensuring that women in PRIs have equal voices and representation in political institutions. Elected bodies continue to be largely male-dominated structures, with male members taking leadership roles and controlling decision making. In many instances, this has been seen that men have tried to take advantage of their wife’s elected role or infringe on her position of influence. Additionally, reservations in municipals bodies and PRIs have not been accompanied by reservations in the Parliament or State Assemblies.