The Hindu Business Line : Harvest of promises?

In my interaction with some deans of agricultural universities, I found appalling their ignorance and lack of sensitivity to gender and social issues. — Vasanthi Devi, Educationist and women's rights activist.

Over the years, the percentage of women in agriculture, both as labourers and cultivators, has increased; in the 1991 Census women constituted 38 per cent of agricultural labour and this figure jumped to 46 per cent in 2001. Similarly, women cultivators increased from 20 per cent to 32 per in the same period.

But is women's role in Indian agriculture being acknowledged, leave alone lauded or respected?

"How can we ensure that a National Policy for Farmers (NPF) leads to recognising and assigning to women their rightful place in all aspects of crop and animal husbandry, fisheries and forestry, both at the production and post-harvest phases of these lifesaving enterprises? How can we ensure that there is value addition to the time and labour of rural women?"

Fortunately, these questions are raised by eminent agricultural scientist and Chairman of the National Commission on Farmers Dr M.S. Swaminathan. In the proposed NPF, its chief is determined to take on board all the vital issues related to feminisation of agriculture. Towards this end the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and the NPF had last week organised a brainstorming workshop titled `Beijing +10- Women in Agriculture in India — What next?'

Some key issues at the workshop pertained to land rights still eluding women, even the minimum stipulated wage not being paid to them, and there being little or no concern over the fact that for a woman, labour on the fields is additional work, as she has domestic work at home too... in the kitchen and caring for children.

Highlighting the total lack of sensitivity when it comes to taking on board gender issues, Mina Swaminathan, Project Director, Uttara Devi Research Centre for Gender and Development, MSSRF, said that often she had found ICDS (Integrated Child Development Scheme) representatives referring to women as `mothers'. Obviously, the term did not include single women or married women who did not have children!

Social sensitivity

Underlining the need for some thought and flexibility in distributing services to women, she gave the example of the `laddoo scheme' in Tamil Nadu. Under the noon meal scheme, schoolchildren were given laddoos and this was extended even to pregnant women and women nursing babies for the first six months. When she found that only 40 per cent of the female beneficiaries turned up to collect the laddoos, and sought the reason, she was told: `Madam these are illiterate and ignorant women and they do not know the nutritional benefits of the laddoo.'

Said Mina, "I was sure that this response was not based on any research but came from the top of the head of the officer giving the explanation." Well aware that a woman who had to go to the field for a day's work would not walk all the way to the distribution centre just to collect a laddoo and then head back for work, she suggested that the time for distributing laddoos to women be changed. Once this was done, within two months, the laddoo offtake by women in a district like Tirunelveli went up from 40 to 80 per cent.

She also expressed concern about the increase in the number of women-headed households thanks to the increasing migration of men from their homes in search of livelihood. "Earlier we had women-headed families when a woman was widowed or deserted, but now they become de-facto heads when their husbands migrate. This increases the burden on the woman; she is responsible both for livelihood and as a caretaker. In such a scenario there is an urgent increasing need to have support services for such households."

But a recent startling phenomenon, as pointed out by K. Balakrishnan, general secretary of the Tamil Nadu Farmers Association, is that with the plight of the small and marginal farmers getting from bad to worse — first it was drought and now it is floods — even women are now migrating. "Till now women in Tamil Nadu never left their homes; but now the situation is so desperate that women are going out in search of some job or the other. Hundreds of teenage girls are going out to hosiery and textile centres such Tirupur, Salem, Coimbatore, Dindigul and Tiruchi. Most of them go to these factories to earn their own dowry, and many end up getting exploited," he said.

C.P. Sujaya, a visiting fellow in Gender and Development at MSSRF, who is preparing the draft document on women in agriculture for the NPF report, said despite all kinds of platitudes and intentions "women still do not figure as an important issue in planning. Of course women have moved out in policy documents from `welfare subjects' and a lot has been achieved in bettering their lot, but when it comes to planning, they are given little importance."

Land rights

She said that even if the target of a 4 per cent growth in agriculture had been achieved — something that has not happened — "we need to ask if the needs of poor women would have been met. We're just scratching at the problem of rural poverty, and while class division might have narrowed, the gender division is not narrowing".

Expressing concern that the issue of women's right to land had not made any headway, Sujaya, who is a retired IAS officer, said a woman could get land only from three sources; inheritance, grant of government land or purchase/leasing of private land. But the problem was that land distribution was a State and not Central subject and implementation at the State-level was highly uneven. A major problem was the legal illiteracy of a majority of women.

Quoting from a study done in UP she said, "None of the rural households surveyed in two districts understood the meaning of the pharse `joint pattas' and were unaware of government directive that land would be allotted in the name of women." And, there was not a single case of land being allotted to a woman individually or on joint patta basis.

"In Orissa, a study found that payment of compensation for land acquired from female heads of households found its way to middlemen who invariably cheated the women of their money." Even in landowning families, women's names are generally absent from land records. She said that organisations such as SEWA and Adithi in Bihar had done pioneering work in getting land rights for women's groups but had to battle tons of red tape before making a breakthrough. Similarly the Deccan Development Society had worked with Dalit women.

What is a women's question

Striking a poignant note she said: "What is the women's question? What is women's empowerment? Providing a crèche at the workplace is empowerment. Ultimately we have to ask the question... what are we looking at? A pair of hands to shell prawns, do household work, or anything else. A colleague of mine (in the IAS) told me that she had sat through six different meetings of the Planning Commission and seen six different views on women. Our biggest failure is that we have not been able to come to a common agenda on what a woman's question really is."

Concerns on liberalisation and privatisation remain. Venkatesh Athreya, Programme Director, Technical Resource Centre for Food Security, MSSRF, said any discussion on women in agriculture would have to take place recognising "the larger macro economy policy context and overall economic structure, as well as the neo-liberal economic policies followed since 1991."

Even within the earlier structure "women had multiple burdens and a lack of access to productive assets, including land; now it is even worse. With the state withdrawing from key sectors such as education, health and rural infrastructure, the woman's situation had worsened and her problems multiplied," he added.

Dr Swaminathan said the NCF's intent was to bring about a "paradigm shift in agricultural planning by placing faces before figures" and "human dimensions of agriculture before the statistical aspects of agricultural progress. The economic and nutritional well-being of farm women and men alone will help improve our agricultural performance and mitigate the current agrarian crisis."

He added that self-help groups could not be considered a "panacea for lifting rural women out of poverty. Unless there is capacity-building and mentoring for them, they will remain as mere thrift and credit societies."

An important question relates to the role played by thousands of students who pass out from our agricultural universities, pointed out educationist and women's rights activist Vasanthi Devi. According to one estimate, "hardly 2 per cent of them go back to agriculture. What is happening to the rest of them? What is their gender or social sensitivity? In my interaction with some of the deans of agricultural universities, I found appalling their ignorance and lack of sensitivity to gender and social issues. So we have to also address the issue of sensitising the students passing out from these universities," she said.

While talking of women, the issue of child labour should also be brought on, said AIDWA Secretary R. Chandra. In Dindigul district almost 1,000 acres of paddy land have been taken over for jasmine cultivation where many children are working.

But then how does one battle with stereotypes in giving women their rightful importance in agriculture, asked Sujaya. Quoting from a UNDP report, she said, "Conventional images of women workers in the unorganised and informal sectors of work in India still persist. These are created and recreated by the media, of women hammering or cutting stones; standing knee-deep in water, transplanting paddy; moving on construction sites, with heavy loads on their heads; winnowing the harvest; carrying home stacks of firewood; etc." Most often, all this was not even considered work. Only women who work in offices, hospitals, schools, telephone exchanges, etc were often looked at as `women workers'.

"The memorable snapshot of large numbers of women busy working on building a road near a board showing `Men at work' says it all."

Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

Top picture by K.K. Mustafah

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