This book offers a critical perspective on the issues related to women's empowerment, microfinance, and entrepreneurship in India. Written by distinguishing experts in this field, this book highlights women's empowerment, which is a process of entrusting power to an individual on the control over resources and decisions. However, these two factors are less effective in a society where religion and cultural dominance is high. The book sheds light on the social security measures undertaken by the government aiming to the right to work helped women who are bounded by social restrictions. Over time there is a shift in rural occupational structure towards non-farm activities, which is largely distress driven self-employment. Access to credit is a great source to provide self-employment that develops self-esteem among women and uplift their position. The book highlights the discrimination against women entrepreneurs in access to credit led to gender biased entrepreneurial society. Association with self-help groups (SHGs) has made women more socially empowered. SHG members help them to change their life in a positive manner through micro-entrepreneurial activities. The book has emphasized on the role of microfinance, which has served the poor to become financially self-reliant. It is observed that for second generation borrowers, the impact of microfinance seems to fizzle out, where MFIs who are gaining efficiency are diverting their objective of servicing poor, signalling a sign of mission drift.

The MODELS series of conferences is the premier venue for the exchange of innovative technical ideas and experiences relating to model-driven approaches inthedevelopmentofsoftware-basedsystems.Followingthetraditionofprevious conferences,MODELS2009hostedseveralsatelliteeventsinDenver.Therewere ten workshops and two symposia. The selection of the workshops was performed by a Workshop Committee, which consisted of the following experts: - James M. Bieman, Colorado State University, USA (Chair) - Peter Clarke, Florida International University, USA - Holger Giese, University of Paderborn, Germany - Frank Weil, Hengsoft, USA The workshops and symposia were held during the ?rst three days of the conference. They provided a collaborative forum for groups of participants to exchange recent and preliminary results, conduct intensive discussions on a p- ticular topic, and to coordinate e?orts between representatives of a technical community. They discussions were lively and the attendance was high. The focus of the Educators'Symposium was on sharing experience related to teaching modeling techniques and on developing resources to support e?ective training of future practitioners of model-driven development. The DoctoralSymposiumprovideda forumin whichPhDstudents presented their work in progress. The symposium fostered the role of MODELS as a p- mier venue for research in model-driven engineering. The symposium provided the students with independent and constructive feedback about their already completed work, and more importantly, their planned research work.