Due to its widespread usage, there are a variety of understandings of the term empowerment. However, if empowerment is defined as the major ability to essentially make choices, then being disempowered implies being denied choice. The present paper is an attempt to analyze the significant status of women's empowerment in India using various factors and indicators based on data from secondary sources. The study reveals that in spite of many efforts undertaken by the government, women in India are relatively disempowered and they also enjoy a somewhat lower status than that of men. The present paper also highlights the issues and challenges of women's empowerment. One of the most important concerns of the 21st century is the empowerment of women, but practically, women's empowerment is still an illusion of reality in India. The notion of empowerment is that it is inescapably bound up with the condition of disempowerment and refers to the processes by which those who have been denied the ability to make choices acquire such ability. Thus, there could be statistical swells indicating improvements in indicators of gender equality, but unless the intervening process involved women as agents of that change, one cannot term it as' empowerment’. People who do exercise a great deal of choice in their lives may be very powerful, but they actually are not empowered because they were essentially never disempowered right in the first place. In terms of specific activities or end results, empowerment cannot be defined in proper terms because it involves a process whereby women can freely develop, analyze and also voice their needs and interests without them being pre-defined or imposed from above. Also, the assumption that planners can identify women’s needs runs against empowerment objectives. Education, on the other hand, is a milestone of women's empowerment because it enables them to respond to challenges, to go ahead and confront their traditional role and change their lives. Education also brings a reduction in inequalities and also functions as a means of improving their own status within the family and also developing the concept of participation. The current paper also attempts to develop conceptual clarity of the term empowerment, delineating it from several other overlapping concepts such as social inclusion, gender equality, and so on, and it also advocates an inclusive approach of policy measures in which planners working toward an empowerment approach develop important ways of enabling women themselves to critically review their own situation.