India is a growing economy with an increasing say of Science and Technology (S&T) in almost all fields and walks of life. The S&T intervention has brought significant changes in the lives and livelihood of people for good. It has also empowered women as never before. The challenges faced by women range from social to cultural, from economic to political, etc. The numerous challenges that rural and peri-urban women have to face in their day-to-day lives are a bit different from those encountered by women in metropolitans and big cities. The myriad challenges faced by rural women are managing the household chores to struggling for their daily bread.
Against this backdrop, women’s empowerment is the need of the hour and no community or country can afford to take it for granted. A noble step in this direction is the establishment of Women Technology Parks (WTPs) across the nation that act as centres for empowering rural women by training them on the use of appropriate technologies that uses locally available raw materials for the production of indigenous products. The WTPs have emerged as potent centers for the livelihood generation of rural women thus bringing them to the fold of the economy from the fringes.
WTPs help create an enabling environment so that the S&T interventions can be extended for micro-enterprise development by women and enhance their income. These parks strive to provide a competitive market for the indigenous products manufactured by women and thus are a real boost to the ‘VocalforLocal’. Capacity building, value-addition of products, and technology up-gradation lie at the core of making these parks sustainable.The Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) has been prepared to assist the prospective WTPs, the existing WTPs and funding agencies with the knowledge and information about various procedures and pre-requisites.