On The Contrary | Episode 4: What if women in India stopped farming?

Farmers' rights activist, Kavitha Kuruganti, and independent consultant and adviser on emerging markets and agriculture, Ireena Vittal, discuss the crucial but invisible role women farmers play in Indian agriculture.

"I just want to point out that even the number that is stated—of 40 percent of all agricultural workers being women—is questionable. There is probably no woman out there who’s not a worker and no rural woman out there who’s not associated, at least peripherally, with agriculture. So that’s a questionable number. But among women who are counted as workers by our official data systems, at least 73 percent (as per the latest numbers) are engaged in agriculture. And they are engaged in agriculture in what is called as a self-employed category, or as a casual labourer, [or as] agricultural labourer. Different kinds of surveys in India have different terminologies that they deploy—cultivators, self-employed, agricultural labourer, and so on. So, we are talking about a very important category of workers engaged in agriculture, and that’s women. And Indian agriculture is driven mostly because [of] women putting in their labour. And Indian rural women are mostly surviving off agriculture. It is almost a symbiotic relationship. Agriculture needs women farmers and women farmers need agriculture. But the problem really is that no one actually visibilises these women as farmers in their own right. [This is] despite the fact that we have an official national policy for farmers [that was launched] in 2007. [This policy], for the first time, delinked the definition of farmers, at least as far as policymakers are theoretically concerned, from land ownership. Otherwise the definition of a farmer is you have land, or the census definition requires a farmer to be risk taking—somebody who takes risks to be entrepreneurial in the field of agriculture. For the first time, the national policy for farmers recognises that those who are putting in work and getting something out of productive resources can be termed as farmers. And many women out there—we’re talking about crores and crores of women—will then get classified as farmers". - Kavitha Kuruganti

"If you really look at a rich fruits-and-vegetable farmer in Punjab, he has imported labour from Bihar, or he used to. But if you look at the average guy, his wife does the labour work. He might own the land. So, one is you must be very clear that we’re not talking of the 30–40 million rich farmers who use a lot of labour. We’re talking of the 100 million where the woman is the labour. The second thing is 35–38 percent [of agriculture] is livestock. Livestock in this country, whether it is dairy or poultry, or selling of fish, is completely handled by women. If you look at Amul, its stories are built around women and one of the consequence of the cooperative movement in Gujarat was that as they improved the hygiene of the animal, they improved the hygiene of the family and of the children. And there’s research which shows that because women were the ones who led that whole piece of work, the overall hygiene of villages went up. In the livestock sector, nothing would happen if the women were not involved. Even in rich households that might have six to 10 milch animals, the mental ownership of the animals is always with the woman. So one is to keep in mind Kavitha’s point that we are talking of multiple segments: rich and poor farmers, grain and non-grain, livestock and on field. And everywhere women are important and obviously they are most central where they are unpaid and they are most central in livestock". - Ireena Vittal

The episode was produced by Maed in India.