Agriculture has undergone feminization in India but a range of political and economic factors continue to undervalue rural women and render them invisible.

On 15^thOctober2024, MS Swaminathan Research Foundation celebrated the resilience and contributions of the 3.44 lakh rural women who have been our partners in our continuing efforts towards sustainable agriculture and rural development. To reaffirm our commitment towards promoting gender equality in all our development interventions, we launched the ‘Gender in Focus’ series which aims to initiate serious conversations on rural women’s contributions to agriculture, food security and poverty reduction, and the various barriers that continue to impede them from enjoying the same incomes and status as their male counterparts.

The ‘Gender in Focus’ series was launched on the 15^th of October with a lecture by Prof Madhura Swaminathan on ‘Rural Women and the Political Economy of Food Systems Transformation in India’.

Prof. Madhura started her talk by reminding us that with approximately 405 million women living and working in its villages, India has the largest population of rural women in the world today and that a large majority of these women are involved some kind of work in agriculture including allied activities like fish production, sericulture and livestock farming. She said that the sheer number of rural women in India and the magnitude of their contributions to agriculture and food security make it imperative that we focus on revaluing their labour and work towards improving the quality of their lives. She emphasized that rural women in India is not a homogenous group. They are differentiated by caste and class and therefore any organization that aims to improve the lives of rural women or any conversation about rural women must first recognize these differences and inequalities that divide women and then work towards building a sense of community to achieve the goal of gender equality.

In her talk, Prof Madhura focused on highlighting the political-economic factors that have contributed to the invisibilisation and undervaluation of rural women’s labour in the agrifood systems in India. These are:

The failure of official statistics to capture the range of diverse economic activities that women perform in agriculture. Women who engage in agriculture can be categorized into three groups- 1) women who work in their own farms 2) women who work on others’ farms who are generally referred to as wage workers 3) women who hire other workers to work in their farms. In reality however, many women small farmers not just work in their own farms but they also work as wage labourers in others’ farms making the boundaries of these categorizations fluid. So, a woman farmer in India often play diverse roles that rarely get captured in the government data.

This inability of the official surveys and statistics to capture the wide range of activities that women perform in agriculture has resulted in an underestimation of rural women’s labour force participation in India.

She suggests that when time use surveys are used that ask women to narrate/report how women spend their time in a day and when these surveys are repeated during different phases of the agricultural cycle, it has been found that close to 95 percent of rural women spent a major part of their time in agriculture during the harvest season and during the lean season this proportion drops to 50-60 percent. In addition to crop production, women also engage in livestock farming which also involves a whole range of activities.

This point to the simple fact that women participate in the workforce when work is available in the villages and that it is lack of adequate economic opportunities in the villages that have caused women’s relatively poorer participation in the workforce. Unlike men, the gendered expectations that bind women to household responsibilities and care work make it harder for women to commute or migrate to access the non-farm opportunities thatare created in the urban centres. Consequently, women stay back in the village and work whenever opportunities arise.

With more men exiting agriculture to access non-farm jobs because of relatively higher wages, agriculture has undergone feminization. And yet, all agricultural and livestock policies related to land, credit, wages, extension services and technological interventions do not necessarilytake into account the specific requirements of women farmers.

Though women are the backbone of agriculture and livestock farming in India, they continue to be marginalized from positions of power at all levels. Consequently, women are grossly underpaid which even affects her ability to access good nutritious food.

You can find the full video of the lecture here: