Centre For Community Economics and Development Consultants Society

Strengthening the Leadership of Elected Women Representative in Gram Panchayat

Project brief


Strengthening the Leadership of Elected Women Representative in Gram Panchayat project is running in 110 Gram Panchayats of Kotkhavda (Jaipur), Newai (Tonk) and Shahbad (Baran) blocks. The status of women in Rajasthan is poor in literacy, opportunities of participation in public meetings & mobility, participation in decision making etc. After 50 percent reservation women have been elected in Gram Panchayats in a large number but due to their background and patriarchy, they are less allowed to actively work in the local governance. Males of the family enjoy the status of elected representatives instead elected women.


The project focus on capacity building of elected representatives in the working are and develop them as active elected representative to address the issues of community.

Objectives of Project

The objective of project is strengthening the leadership of elected women representatives of Gram Panchayats.

Impact/Statistics

Santosh Sahariya, Sarpanch of Balda gram Panchayat, Shabad won the award of WWSF, Switzerland for her contribution in women empowerment.

EWRs have addressed the issues of quality education, better health services, food security of poor and vulnerable and other basic infrastructure development at villages level e. g. safe drinking water, electricity, roads etc.

Major activities

The program targets at strengthening elected women representatives and ensures good governance by them. So, it engages then in various activities through out their term i. e. five year. For contesting good leaders, maximum voting and voters awareness, a campaign take place at block level. Various activities organize at village and cluster level under the campaign such as potential leaders identification and their training, simulation camps awareness generation activities etc. After election Women Leadership Development Workshops take place for four days as induction training for elected women. Need Based workshops aim at enhancing their understanding on different socio – cultural issues, government schemes and programs and other technical issues. Apart these continues activities Mahila Jagruk Manch formed at Gram Panchayat level to involve village women more in governance and decision making. Block level federations of Elected Women Representatives (EWRs) have been formed to address the policy level issues. Exposures, conventions and media workshops at district and block level organize for recognition of contribution of elected women representatives and addressing their issues.

In the year of 2015 – 2020 125 EWRs at Shahbad, 221 at Newai and 198 at Chaksu were part of the program.