Abstract
There occurs one rape every 14 minutes and one incident of cruelty by husband or his relatives every 5 minutes (NCRB, 2016). Alongside, the female labour force participation rate across India has declined from 30.28% in 1990 to 20.52% in 2019 (World Bank, 2020). Excessive dependence on family (for both physical and economic safety) and lack of knowledge about various laws that safeguard women could be a major reason for the reduction in the female labour force participation rate. In the current study, we plan to conduct awareness workshops with adolescent girls, wherein the various laws which protect women’s rights and self-defense techniques shall be discussed. We plan to see whether these workshops improve women’s knowledge about these laws, instill self-confidence among women and positively affect their future hopes and aspirations, in the form of motivating them to go for higher education and participate in the labour force, etc. We also plan to see whether these workshops have significant spillover effects on siblings and friends of the participants, particularly focusing on heterogeneous effects by age and gender of siblings and caste of friends. We also plan to conduct a follow-up survey six months after the endline survey to understand whether the effects persist over time.