Women constitute half of the humanity, even contributing two-third of world’s work hours. Traditionally women in almost every society have remained a second grade citizen. Hence, neither they are allowed to get themselves educated nor they are given legal rights in the property, government and in administration. Empowerment is a multi-dimensional process, which enable women or group of women to realize their full identity and power in all spheres of life (Surekharao and Rajamanamma, 1999). Income generating activities are considered as those initiatives that affect the economic aspects of people’s lives through the use of economic tools such as credit. Self- Help Groups have emerged as one of the major strategies for women’s empowerment and various schemes of the Government of India have shown that strong women’s groups could contribute substantially to the development and convergence of services and activities. The present investigation was conducted in Jaipur district of Rajasthan which was selected purposively. Two Panchayat samities viz. Viratnagar and Jhotwara were selected purposively for the study, due to having maximum number of Self-Help Groups in Jaipur District. From each selected Panchayat samiti, three villages were selected randomly consisting of total 6 villages for study purpose. From each selected village two SHGs one run by DWCD and another run by NGO running from last 3-5 years and actively involved in different income generating activities consisting a total of 6 SHGs from DWCD and 6 SHGs from NGOs were selected randomly. From each SHG, 10 rural women, actively involved in the income generating activities from last 3-5 years, were selected randomly. Thus, the overall sample consisted of 120 respondents comprising 60 rural women from SHGs run by DWCD and 60 rural women from SHGs run by NGOs. An interview schedule consisting of measuring devices of dependent and independent variables along with the face data of rural women involved in the income generating activities of Self- Help Groups was prepared. The data were collected by the investigator by personally interviewing the rural women in local dialect with the help of structured interview schedule. Thereafter, data were tabulated, analyzed and inferences were drawn after subjecting the data to statistical analysis which led to the following major findings. It was found that majority of the rural women involved in the income generating activities of Self-Help Groups were having medium level of empowerment. There was 96.39 percent gain in both i.e Increase in communication ability and Human relationship maintenance ability of the respondents. The extent of empowerment through income generating activity was 65.87 per cent which indicated that still there is scope to empower the women by taking the contributing factors.

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