Paper short abstract:

Gender inequalities in India have an adverse impact on development goals as reduces economic growth. Women’s access to all financial services, including savings, insurance, and remittance transfers and credit, is essential to allow them to benefit fully from economic opportunities.

Paper long abstract:

Gender discrimination continues to be an enormous problem within Indian society especially in rural area. This drastically affects women's health, financial status, education, and political involvement.

Women in many parts of India continue to face discrimination in access to land, housing, property and other productive resources and have limited access to technologies and services that could alleviate their work burdens. Unequal access to resources limits women's capacity to ensure agricultural productivity, livelihoods security, and food security and is increasingly linked to poverty, migration, urbanization. Population growths, climate change, the spread of markets and urbanization have created new opportunities and new challenges in women's access to land, housing and other productive resources. Women's access to all financial services, including savings, insurance, and remittance transfers and credit, is essential to allow them to benefit fully from economic opportunities. Legal, institutional and socio cultural barriers often, however, limit women's access to these services.

Gender inequality is a problem that has a solution. Ensuring women's economic empowerment and access to and control over resources requires an integrated approach to growth and development, focused on gender-responsive employment promotion and informed by the interdependency between economic and social development. Social objectives need to be incorporated into economic policies. Economic growth strategies should give attention to the real economy and focus on creating a gender sensitive macroeconomic environment, full employment and decent work, access to land, property and other productive resources as well as financial services, and full coverage of social protection measures.