Rural Poverty and Female Job Participation: A Case Study of Two Districts in West Bengal

In rural areas, women are the major driving force of development in the communities. They combine the role of farm labour and off-farm occupation together with household activities. They are often entrepreneurial cash-earners supporting their families and creating opportunities for others. Women perform activities like cooking, caring for children and the old, collecting water and fuel wood and overall management of the households. An important prerequisite for performing such roles is an adequate asset base in the households for deriving multiple services and pursuing diversified livelihood strategy. This enables the households to have access to uninterrupted work opportunities for earning a decent income. This paper combines housing condition, diversified asset base and income to form a graded index of poverty where lower values reflect relative poverty. Using primary data from eight villages of four Gram-Panchayats in two relatively backward districts of Bankura and Birbhum in West Bengal, the paper explains the existence of poverty using multiple regression model. A logit regression is also used to analyse the factors that have a bearing on women job participation.