Women’s Political Participation and Empowerment in Urban Local Governance in West Bengal, India

Abstract

Women are long ignored from the organized political arena across the world, but several initiatives have been taken for entrance of women in local-level politics. The main objective of the study is to provide an idea about effective and pseudo-participation of the women representatives and to bring out the factors responsible for kinds of participation. For that, district headquarters of West Bengal have been chosen. Two indices (political empowerment index (PAI) and political awareness index (PEI)) infer that the same category city has different degrees of women’s awareness and participation. The rate of pseudo participation is much higher than the effective participation.