When most people think about farmers, a male figure comes to mind. The livelihood is associated with physical effort – which, for some reason, thought to be the preserve of men. If women enter the picture, they are at best thought of as “agricultural cultivators’ or “agricultural labourers”.
But increasingly, women in many parts of rural India are the ones working on the farms. As falling productivity and the fragmentation of land over generations makes farming increasingly unviable, men are migrating to cities in search of work. Their wives and sisters keep their farms going.
However, though women often work harder than their male counterparts, they are rarely involved in making decisions. According to the agricultural census, while 73.2% of rural women are engaged in farming activities, only 12.8% of them own the land that they work on.
Most of the women farmers I met said that they work on the land owned by their husbands, fathers or brothers – most of whom…