Empowerment and Sustainable Development of Senguttaiyur Village Irular Tribe Women on Eco based Well being Strategies

Abstract

Broad objective Envisage sustainable empowerment and quality well-being of rural women through skill up gradation and micro enterprise using indigenous eco- based resources Specific Objectives Locate a homogenous Irular Settlement with marginal development indices Find out the socio- economic profile of the settlement Identify unique characteristics of Irular women on human societal pursuits Enable samples to realize the limitations and constraints for empowerment Initiate eco based livelihood options through multi-pronged interventions Execute prospects for community development and tribal well being Analyze Empowerment status of sample post intervention Hypothesis: H1. Irular tribe women are not dependent on activities which contribute to feminization of labour H2. Visible improvement in awareness level of Irular women on select social and economic indicators could be enhanced with techno based Intervention H3. Introducing micro enterprises may not act as an instrument to ensure alternate livelihood options for Irular women H4. Focus on wholesome community development (village cohesion) will help redefine women s norms and rules by which they emerge as participants in crucial decision making H5. Action programmes chalked out for the benefit of the Irular women will enable them to achieve an ecobased status of well-being. Methodology : The Plan and Procedure drafted involved a mixed research methodology incorporating qualitative and quantitative methods. The framework was posited to cut across three phases The first and second phases concentrated on understanding the settlement, their characteristics, resources available and accessible and latter sections were streamlined to make the women, in particular, the target group to undergo introspective exercises by which they themselves were forced to come out with the felt lacunae, the hurdles in their path to empowerment and pool ideas to trouble shoot existing problems. The researcher had adopted a quasi experimental research design in the third phase