Women’s empowerment is often understood as enabling women through education, opportunity, and economic independence. For me, however, empowerment goes one step further: it is about creating the conditions in which a woman can discover her identity, recognize her potential, make informed choices, exercise agency, and ultimately become the architect of her own future.
In 2014, I founded the Astitva Women Education & Empowerment Foundation, after experiencing firsthand the systemic barriers and entrenched societal constraints that stifle women’s potential. The Foundation’s name – Astitva, meaning identity, reflects its core philosophy of strengthening a woman’s sense of identity, agency, and right to define who she is. The vision goes beyond opening doors for women; it is about enabling them to recognize, claim, and transform those opportunities into greater agency, self-reliance, and the freedom to make choices that shape their own lives.
This vision is particularly significant in Chhattisgarh, where rural women represent an enormous but often underutilized force for social and economic development. The state has made important strides through initiatives that place financial support and livelihood opportunities directly in the hands of women. Yet true empowerment requires women to become active participants in the economy, decision-makers of their lives, leaders in their communities, and creators of opportunities for others. This philosophy is captured in one of the Foundation’s guiding initiatives, “Udgam Se Udaan” underscoring the belief that transformation begins at the grassroots but must ultimately help women rise above the structural and societal barriers placed in their way.
The Opportunities Ahead
The Power of Mentorship: Many rural women in Chhattisgarh have the capability but not the exposure. A capable student unsure which career to choose, an entrepreneurial mind with no understanding of markets, a technically skilled woman who lacks the confidence to walk into an interview. Mentorship is the bridge that connects ability to opportunity, and it forms a core pillar of my vision.
The Digital Economy: Perhaps the biggest opportunity on the horizon is digital inclusion. Geography has decided who gets access to jobs, training, mentors, and markets, usually concentrated in cities, far from villages. Digital technology can break that link. Remote work, online learning, e-commerce, fintech, and technology-enabled services can bring real economic opportunity to a woman’s doorstep, without requiring her to migrate. But access to a device or the internet is not enough. Real digital inclusion also demands digital skills, cybersecurity awareness, language support, and affordable connectivity. The goal isn’t just to teach women how to use technology, but to help them see how technology can reshape their educational and economic possibilities.
Turning Skills into Self-Reliance: Education alone does not guarantee financial independence; income does. A woman’s first paycheck is often a turning point, changing how she sees herself and how her family sees her. Beyond training women in new skills, there is a bigger opportunity in strengthening rural enterprises and cottage industries, and connecting them to modern markets through better branding, finance, and distribution, supported by vocational centers that bring livelihood opportunities closer to rural communities.
From Welfare to Agency: A central element to this vision is a shift where women should not remain passive beneficiaries of initiatives, rather they should be equipped to become participants in and contributors to the economic and social progress of Chhattisgarh. This distinction matters. A scholarship can help a girl enter higher education. But the larger goal is to help her build a career. A skill-training program can teach a woman how to make a product. But empowerment occurs when she can sell that product, earn an income, access a market, and make decisions about how that income is used. A digital-literacy program can introduce a woman to technology. But its real potential is realized when that technology opens the door to employment, entrepreneurship, education, or financial independence. It is not about isolated interventions. It is about building pathways from opportunity to agency and from agency to self-reliance.
The Hurdles That Remain
A Lack of Permission, Not Ability: One of the most persistent barriers is not a lack of ability, but a lack of permission: social, cultural, or familial. Girls are often encouraged to study only up to a point. Women face restrictions on mobility and employment. Household duties leave little room for skill-building or professional work. Addressing this requires engaging not just women, but families, men, schools, and community leaders because women’s empowerment is not a women-only agenda. It is a social transformation.
The Education-to-Employment Gap: A woman may finish college and still struggle to find a job. She may complete vocational training but have no access to markets. She may have a product to sell but lack the branding, financing, or digital infrastructure to sell it. This is why the real measure of success isn’t how many women were trained; it’s what happened afterwards. Did she find work or start a business? Did her income become sustainable? Did she gain a real say in decisions that affect her life? These outcomes define real empowerment.
The Digital and Geographic Divide: As the economy becomes increasingly digital, women without access to technology risk falling further behind. Closing this gap requires reliable internet, devices, digital literacy, and real opportunities to convert digital skills into income. Distance remains a stubborn barrier too. A college, employer, or market may be many kilometres from a village, which is why decentralised training, village-level enterprises, and remote-work models matter so much.
Health as a Foundation, Not an Afterthought: In rural areas, gaps in awareness about menarche, coupled with persistent menstrual stigma and deeply rooted misconceptions, continue to undermine menstrual health, and with it, girls’ ability to stay in school without interruption. NFHS-5 data (2019–21) show that only 29% of adolescent women aged 15–19 in rural Chhattisgarh exclusively use hygienic methods of menstrual protection, placing the state among the five lowest-performing in the country. The disparity is closely linked to education: women with 12 or more years of schooling were more than twice as likely to use hygienic protection as those with none – a reminder that health, education, and women’s empowerment are the three interconnected pillars that reinforce one another rather than stand apart.
Gender Equality: Breaking the Barriers That Hold Women Back.
Gender equality in Chhattisgarh cannot be measured by access alone. Breaking barriers means confronting the quieter, harder-to-measure walls: the assumption that a girl’s education ends where marriage begins, the belief that a woman’s mobility must be earned rather than assumed, the expectation that her ambition should stop at the edge of the household. These barriers are rarely written into any policy. They live instead in everyday permissions. This is why gender equality is not a program aimed only at women, because a woman’s equality is only as real as the freedom the people around her are willing to give up control over. The objective is not to change rural women because they lack potential. It is to remove the barriers that prevent that potential from being realised. That is why grassroots presence matters: sustained, repeated engagement.
From One Woman to an Entire Community: Behind every initiative is a woman with a story. These stories may be different, but they follow a similar arc: from limited opportunity to greater agency. Ability was never the missing piece; opportunity was. This is perhaps the clearest expression of the vision. When a woman becomes financially independent, her life changes. When a girl is the first in her family to pursue higher education, other girls begin to imagine that path for themselves. When a woman starts a business, she creates work for others. This is how individual empowerment grows into community transformation. Grassroots organisations understand realities that statistics cannot always capture: the hesitation of a girl asking for permission to study, the practical difficulties of reaching a training centre, the importance of a first paycheck, and the confidence that comes when a woman realises her skills have value.
The next chapter of women’s empowerment in Chhattisgarh must move beyond isolated interventions toward an ecosystem of opportunity. In this vision, women are not passive recipients at any stage; they are partners in shaping the solutions meant for them.
Astitva Women Education & Empowerment Foundation: Turning the Vision into Action:
Since 2014, Astitva Foundation, Chhattisgarh, has worked to turn this vision into grassroots action, focusing on education, women’s empowerment, digital inclusion, livelihoods, and health and wellness. These initiatives have reached 132 villages in 16 districts, directly benefiting 32,305 individuals, with cascading impact to over 100,000 people through their families and communities. Its work has also extended beyond implementation into research, advocacy, and participation in wider conversations on gender equality and inclusion. The Foundation was represented at the Civil20 Working Group on Gender Equality, Disability and Inclusion during India’s G20 Presidency, and has been cited internationally in the US and UK as an example of how grassroots action can align with UN SDGs.
The journey, however, is far from complete. As I continue to write the narrative of women’s empowerment in Chhattisgarh, the grassroots work I have spearheaded remains focused on one clear aspiration: helping rural women move from the margins of opportunity to becoming the architects of their own futures. True gender equality will be realised when a girl’s right to choose her own path is no longer treated as an exception worthy of celebration, but as an ordinary, unremarkable norm. That is the moment when a woman is no longer waiting at the margins of change. She becomes the change.
