PULAGUTTAPALLI SAMATHA, P. ANIL SAI 03 04 Women empowerment and gender equality have become topics of utmost importance in the recent times because gender inequality and its socioeconomic and cultural dimensions are all pervasive in the third world as well as in the developed world However in the third world the problem of gender inequality is more acutely associated with economic disempowerment of women And therefore of recent several initiatives are being taken up in the third world countries for the economic empowerment of women so as to reduce the gender inequality Among these initiatives the SelfHelp Group SHG movement which is getting wide spread all over the third world has become the prominent oneThe research interest of the present study was mainly to examine whether SHGs actually contribute to empower women economically as well as socially The study has also examined another problem that whether there is significant variation in the performance of governmentrun and NGO run SHGs The study depends mainly on primary data collected through sample survey of households of SHG women Apart from the household survey a few interviews with the respondents and officers in charge of different SHGs were also conducted Copyright (c) Journal of Science Engineering Technology and Management Science. All rights reserved 2026