Empowerment of Women

In one line

Empowerment is not a slogan if you break it into four things law can actually deliver: legal capacity, economic independence, political representation and freedom from violence.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: empowerment means the acquisition by women of the capacity to make and enforce decisions about their own lives. In legal terms it has four components. LEGAL CAPACITY: the ability to marry, divorce, own, inherit, contract, sue and consent in one's own right, which the codification statutes and the succession amendment deliver. ECONOMIC INDEPENDENCE: access to work, equal pay, maternity provision, property and credit, which articles 39(a), 39(d) and 42 direct and the labour and succession statutes carry out. POLITICAL REPRESENTATION: articles 243D and 243T in local bodies since 1992, and articles 330A, 332A and 334A in the legislatures from 2023. FREEDOM FROM VIOLENCE: the criminal law, the Domestic Violence Act 2005 and the sexual harassment Act 2013. Article 15(3) is the enabling clause under which most of it is done and article 51A(e) states the duty that corresponds to it.

Why the word needs defining

Because it is not a legal term. It appears in no Indian statute as a defined expression, and an answer that treats it as one is guessing.

Because MU uses it as the organising word for the whole module. Several questions ask for the framework of empowerment, and a candidate who has a four-part definition can answer every one of them from the same structure.

And because the distinction between welfare and empowerment is the argument. A welfare measure supplies a benefit and leaves the recipient dependent on the supplier; an empowering measure changes what the person can DO. Maternity benefit is empowering because it makes continuous employment possible; a discretionary allowance is welfare. Say this and the answer stops being a list.

Component one: legal capacity

What it means. The ability to act in law in one's own right: to marry and to refuse, to divorce, to hold and dispose of property, to inherit, to contract, to sue, to consent and to withhold consent.

The instruments. The Hindu Marriage Act 1955, the Hindu Succession Act 1956 and the rest of the Hindu Code; the Special Marriage Act 1954; the Indian Succession Act 1925; the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act 1986 and the Act of 2019; the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005; and the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006.

The judicial contribution. Githa Hariharan v. Reserve Bank of India, reading the word "after" in section 6(a) of the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act 1956 so that a mother is a natural guardian in the father's ABSENCE rather than only after his death; Danial Latifi on maintenance; Shayara Bano on instantaneous talaq; Vineeta Sharma on coparcenary.