E-Paper
Good intentions alone won’t empower Indian women
This article is authored by Sharanya Chandran, director, policy and communications and Akshara Gopalan, former policy manager, gender, J-PAL South Asia.
In a popular version of a nursery rhyme, one with hundreds of millions of views on YouTube, the lyrics go: “The mommies on the bus go, ‘shh shh shh’…” while “the daddies on the bus go, ‘I love you.’” Another teaches: “Mummy ki roti gol gol, papa ka paisa gol gol.” Long before they enter school, children absorb powerful lessons about gender--who nurtures, who earns, and whose work counts.
Over the past decade, India has placed growing emphasis on women-led development, reflected in policies such as Mission Shakti, the government’s umbrella programme for women’s safety and empowerment. The budget allocation this year for programmes supporting women and girls has increased by approximately 12% over last year to ₹5 lakh crore. These efforts mark important progress. Yet they can only go so far unless the social norms shaping women’s everyday realities also change.
Consider internet use. India is on the cusp of reaching a billion internet users, but the latest available data from the National Family Health Survey shows that men in rural India are nearly twice as likely as women to have ever used the internet. This raises critical questions about how much women will benefit from flagship government initiatives such as Digital India, since social programmes that do not take specific actions to address women often fail to bridge gender divides.
As India pursues its ambitious economic vision, it must see women as equal partners in that growth rather than mere beneficiaries of it. This requires changing the hearts and minds of people. The most significant step in this direction would be to engage men and boys because they often have greater freedom to act on gender-equitable beliefs and can drive household-level change. As daunting as it may sound, research shows that it can be done.
Conservative views on women’s roles--within households, labour markets, and public life--tend to play a major role in allowing gender divides to persist. However, such norms, while deeply rooted, are not immutable. A growing body of evidence finds adolescence to be a particularly effective window for shifting gender norms, with lasting effects on attitudes and behaviour.
In one such study, researchers partnered with the NGO Breakthrough and the government of Haryana to evaluate a school-based gender equity curriculum built around interactive classroom discussions. The programme led to more gender-progressive attitudes and behaviours among adolescents, with especially strong effects for boys, who reported doing more domestic work and holding more equitable views. Building on the research from Haryana, governments of Odisha and Punjab have also introduced the curriculum, reaching nearly 3.8 million children every year.
It is also important to remember that programmes geared towards access alone are insufficient. When programmes provide women with resources without simultaneously addressing their control over those resources, they often replicate existing inequalities. Reversing this requires developing policies that enhance women’s autonomy, give them decision-making powers, and enable them to overcome entrenched norms.
Madhya Pradesh’s experience is instructive to this end. A study in the state found that depositing (erstwhile) MGNREGS wages directly into women's bank accounts, when combined with training on account use, increased women's labour force participation. It also increased women’s mobility, liberalised attitudes towards their work, strengthened their bargaining power, and enabled them to challenge orthodox gender norms. Contrast this with studies from India, Sri Lanka, and Ghana, which find that in households running multiple businesses, capital given to women was often redirected to male-run enterprises. Social norms that expect husbands to earn more than their wives drove this trend in part.
These insights point to a larger lesson. When policies account for social realities and are developed intentionally and thoughtfully, they can deliver lasting change at scale. Women-led development cannot be treated as a standalone chapter or a checklist of schemes. It must be embedded across policies and programmes, guided by a clear understanding of how power, norms, and control shape outcomes. Importantly, policy design does not merely operate within social norms--can actively reshape them by changing defaults, visibility, and control.
As India advances its vision of Nari Shakti and Viksit Bharat, the challenge is not only to expand women-focused programmes, but to ensure that development itself is designed in ways that enable women to lead, decide, and benefit. Women’s development cannot be an isolated 10-point chapter. It has to be on every page of the Viksit Bharat book.
This article is authored by Sharanya Chandran, director, policy and communications and Akshara Gopalan, former policy manager, gender, J-PAL South Asia.
