A STUDY ON FEMINIZATION OF POVERTY IN INDIA

The phenomenon of the "feminization of poverty" describes not merely a statistical concentration of income deficits among women, but an entrenched, structural paradigm wherein systemic gender biases, institutional exclusion, and patriarchal socio-cultural frameworks perpetuate multi-dimensional deprivation. In the contemporary Indian socio-economic milieu, despite sustained macro-economic growth and comprehensive constitutional guarantees of equality and affirmative state action under Articles 14, 15, 21 , 38, 39, and 42 of the Constitution of India, women continue to bear a disproportionately severe burden of persistent impoverishment. This multi-layered vulnerability manifests through severe time-poverty driven by uncompensated and unrecognized domestic reproductive labor, systemic exclusion from tangible asset ownership—most acutely agricultural land—labor market segregation within volatile informal and care economies, asymmetric wage differentials, and exacerbated deprivation among female-headed households, rural widows, and marginalized caste and tribal communities. Adopting a robust doctrinal and feminist socio-legal methodology, this study critically interrogates the Indian legislative and institutional matrix governing economic rights. The investigation examines the practical efficacy of statutory enactments including the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (MGNREGA), the Code on Wages, 2019, the Code on Social Security, 2020, and the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005. Integrating the Capabilities Approach formulated by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum with Bina Agarwal’s foundational gendered asset framework, this study demonstrates that formal legislative parity fails to translate into substantive distributive justice in the absence of robust tenure security, institutional credit democratization, uncompromised public social infrastructure, and gender-responsive fiscal auditing. The monograph concludes by formulating transformative institutional remedies, statutory reforms, and programmatic imperatives designed to dismantle the structural architectures of gendered destitution, thereby translating constitutional guarantees ofhuman dignity into lived realities for Indian women.