Empowerment of the Scheduled Castes: Approaches, Framework and Challenges of Measuring Empowerment

Abstract

The empowerment of weaker sections of society, especially Scheduled Castes and Tribes in India, has been one of the proclaimed priorities of all welfare states worldwide. Although the Government of India, like many other countries, has declared empowerment as its primary objective in the policies of upliftment for the oppressed sections of society, the government does not define the concept of empowerment precisely at all, and there is no attempt to devise a method to quantify it. In reality, empowerment means approaches to realistic behaviour that affect material life and the mental perspective of all actors, including policymakers and recipients. Therefore, there is a need to explore different approaches to empowerment, a context to consider its organisational roles and major challenges in creating an empowerment assessment method.