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Abstract

Women represent nearly half of the population and if empowered, will enhance the pace of national development.Education is considered as a milestone for women empowerment because it enables them to respond to challenges, to confront their traditional role and change their lives.Ideally, it should be equity approach and not welfare oriented one.Women have so much unexplored potential which has hardly been harnessed.According to the census of 2011, the female literacy rate was 65.46% whereas male literacy rate was over 80%.Gram Panchayat is viewed as a solution to all the problems related to rural development and plays a significant role in the empowerment of the marginalized section of society, especially women.This analysis also reveals that libraries can have profound influence in dissemination of knowledge to empower women of the community-at-large.This paper discusses the effectiveness of Kanyashree Prakalpa in women empowerment and the role and contribution of Teachers, Gram Panchayats and Librarians as well as the challenges and changes that we must have to deal with during the process.Kanyashree Prakalpa, an initiative taken by the Government of West Bengal can be successfully spread among the community-at-large by the public libraries