Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma on Friday said that his government is working to provide different opportunities to enable economic empowerment of women. The state government has conceptualized a programme to empower women through different economic activities, he said.
Through the SHG movement, the Meghalaya government is ensuring that women are made financially independent, he said while speaking at the National Seminar on “Representation of Women of North East India in Multi–Disciplinary Discourse” at Don Bosco College, Tura, Meghalaya on Friday.
Meghalaya is one of the few states in the country, where 95 per cent of the women from rural areas are part of the Self Help Group movement. He said that there are over 4 lakh women under the SHG movement in the state, which was around 35,000 thousand prior to 2018.
The seminar saw the participation of Education Minister Rakkam A Sangma and scholars from different parts of the country. The keynote address was delivered by Prof Sukalpa Bhattacharjee of the NEHU Shillong campus.
Sangma also told the gathering of a situation, where young women were at high risk due to childbirth without spacing of three years and some young women even giving birth to more than five children by the age of 23 years.
“So we had to come up with a long-lasting solution that ensures the health and well-being of a mother. The Safe Motherhood Programme addresses the concern of women. We have also introduced intervention that empowers women financially through income generating activities initiated through Self Help Group,” he added.
He said that there are different problems confronting women in the state, but the government is working with an approach to provide effective solutions to those problems.
“Having a positive mindset does not mean that we overlook the problem. However, we come up with a perspective to address the concern and improve things. It is a challenge but we have to come up with an approach to ensure real change,” he stressed.
