Addressing gender disparity

What is the issue?

Despite the significant participation of women in agriculture and allied activities, gender disparity manifests in various ways.

How far is women's participation?

• Women comprise around 30% of the total cultivators and 40% of agricultural labour (2011 Census).
• In as many as 23 of the 29 states, women’s share in the total workforce in agriculture, forestry and fisheries is over 50%.
• In states such as Chhattisgarh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, this share exceeds 70 per cent.
• Women are seen to be engaged in all kinds of jobs ranging from crop sowing to irrigation, fertiliser application, weed removal and crop harvesting.
• They are also actively engaged in allied activities including livestock rearing, fodder collection, beekeeping, mushroom cultivation, poultry, etc.
• Typically, their contribution to agriculture is more in hilly regions where agriculture relies heavily on females, than in the plains.
• Gender disparity is less in states such as Nagaland, Manipur and Himachal Pradesh.
• On the other hand, states such as Punjab, Haryana, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Odisha have relatively high gender work participation disparity.

What are the concerns?

• Despite this significant participation, women are grossly discriminated against in several respects.
• They are invariably paid less than the male workers; in most cases nearly 60 per cent of what men are paid.
• They lack ownership of property, the land being rarely in their names.
• Consequently, they have little access to cheaper credit and other agriculture-related sops, which are usually linked to land ownership.
• They have little say in decision-making. They are not often the members of cooperative societies.
• A relatively larger proportion of non-property-owning females face psychological and physical abuse, than those who own land or other property.

What are the initiatives in this regard?

• Information - Bhubaneswar-based Central Institute of Women in Agriculture (CIWA) has developed a “General Knowledge System Portal”.
• The portal offers to provide all the information on gender-friendly technologies, statistics, publications and official schemes related to farm women.
• This could be swiftly operationalised to function as a single-window knowledge source on gender-related matters for policymakers, researchers, extension workers, etc.
• Training - The country’s 680 Krishi Vigyan Kendras (agricultural science centres) are training women in various income-generating pursuits.
• The centres promoted different women-oriented technologies in their working fields.
• Women are trained in typical agri-rural fields as well as in rural handicrafts, tailoring and stitching, etc
• Measures - The agriculture ministry has recently taken many gender-sensitive, positive steps to promote the welfare of farm women.
• It has begun to encourage leasing of agricultural and domestic land in joint names.
• Kisan Credit Cards are being issued to women to enable them to access cheap bank credit.
• Women are being motivated to form self-help groups to deal with microfinance.
• Most importantly, 30 per cent of funds are being set apart for women under the various schemes run by the ministry.
• These efforts could be more targeted, directly or indirectly, at economic empowerment of women, ensuring gender parity.

Source: Business Standard