In recent years, many studies have pointed out the immense gap that exists within the Indian agricultural sector: A majority of Indian farmers are women, and yet, their contribution to the sector and the rights they deserve to have, tend to get ignored and undermined. A new study by the Centre for New Economics Studies, Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, OP Jindal Global University, sheds much-needed light on what is one of the worst-affected agricultural areas of Maharashtra—Vidarbha.
Vidarbha currently has the highest per capita farmer suicides in the country—a statistic that puts the women farmers in this region some of the worst-affected due to multipronged disadvantages. The study highlights this very fact.
The study observes that women farmers tend to do more time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks within the farming sector, like weeding, loosening the soil, seed preservation, etc. Despite carrying a heavier burden of the workload, these women farmers also perform domestic and intra-household duties. This means their workload, once you consider the agricultural and domestic duties, is immense—and consecutively, so is their contribution to keeping this sector together.
And yet, because these women farmers do not own the land they farm on, they have limited access to markets, irrigation, storage infrastructures—everything that enables farmers further. Moreover, female agricultural workers in the Vidarbha region earn daily wages of only ₹150, while their male counterparts earn daily wages between ₹350-400. This is largely due to the inherent gender inequality in labour across all sectors in the country, but especially in rural India. With lesser earnings and lower rights to own land rights, the vicious cycle in which women farmers are stuck continues to exist. The isolation women farmers face, and the dependency they continue to have on male members of the family only exacerbate the issue.
The study highlights the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the women farmers of Vidarbha, especially focusing on government schemes and waivers on loans which have somewhat eased the economic pressure on these women. The study also sheds light on the methods of formalisation of women farmers, which can go a long way in bringing women farmers into the fold of formal agricultural workers, making them eligible for many benefits that they deserve.