Role of Infrastructure Development to Empower Women

Abstract

A modern economy is market focused. It is held that when a woman becomes a participant in the market on her own term as a rational economic agent she is empowered in an economic sense. It does not take into account the other spectrums of empowerment viz. gender political, cultural and like. A nation's infrastructure provides the basic scaffolding for development. The differences in how men and women use infrastructure services have important implications for sector policies, investment priorities, and program designs. This chapter will analyse how the infrastructure development programme as an economic process assist women to enhance capability of them within society and how its actual impact is mutually constituted by other non-economic social processes and make it an over determined matter. Our study has shown that adequate access of the social infrastructure services has fetched benefits for women and ensures empowerment of women.