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Women play a pivotal role in agriculture—as wage labor, as farmers, as co-farmers and as
unpaid family labor. When males migrate, desert their wives or die, or when males in the
household are inactive for some reason, women take over as managers of farms. The main
agricultural operations performed by women are seedling, sowing/planting, weeding, harvesting,
threshing and applying manure. Livestock care takes up a considerable part of their time and
energy, although it is often treated as an extension of household work.1 They also help men
in preparing field, plucking, picking food grains and their storage. Most of the above
activities are exclusively done by women. But the problems of rural women and their crucial
role in agriculture, food production, forestry and other allied sectors have been neglected.
There is no denying the fact that women do not have equal access to beneficial change,
and their status in society is not identical to that of men. This is especially true in villages.
Several studies have shown that the woman employee—whatever job she holds—is equal in
efficiency and performance to the male employee in identical employment situations. Some
of the studies even indicate that in certain aspects, the woman employee is even more
efficient. In matters of reliability, promptness and punctuality, she has been found to have an
edge over her male counterpart (Devi, 1982).
The women are generally consulted more for selected agricultural decisions like amount
of grains to be used, stored and sold, getting credit and its repayment, employment of family
and casual labor for operations like sowing, weeding and harvesting, use of new variety seeds,
selling and buying of new cattle, buying new equipments and selling and buying of land and
property, etc. Devendar and Chittedi (2011) revealed that the rural women in our society are
exploited and denied their basic rights. Their inherent dignity and equal inalienable rights
are not recognized in the society.
At present, women mostly participate in fruit and vegetable processing, flower gardening,
ornamental nursery, kitchen gardening and, to some extent, vegetable growing in North India,
while in South India, besides these operations, women also participate in vegetable and flower
marketing and nursery technology. As compared to southern states, women’s participation in
supervision of agriculture is less in the northern states of the country like Punjab and Haryana.
The possible reasons for this may be, they themselves participate in the operations. Women
supervise such activities as arranging for the sales of the products, storing hay, picking of pods
and vegetables, picking of cotton, scaling of maize cobs, cutting and charring of fodder,
hoeing and weeding, seeding and sowing, etc. |
