Rural unemployment: When jobs disappear, women are the first to lose out

The 'feminisation of agriculture' is 'not to be celebrated', because farm jobs keep women confined to 'low paid, insecure and oppressive labour relations'.

When Kamal Gangrude looks across at the fields beside her home on the valley floor, she sees swathes of farmland which this year will not be weeded, ploughed or planted. Sold to developers who will build factories and roads or generally put it to non-agricultural use, the loss of this farmland has also meant a loss of vital labouring jobs for the Dalit families of Pimplad, a village in Nashik district of Maharashtra.

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Previously when the monsoon rains arrived, villagers like Gangrude were assured of at least two months of work, earning between Rs 200-250 per day in the nearby rice fields. Now the work available has decreased and is more irregular. “The population is growing but the number of jobs is reducing each year,” Gangrude told IndiaSpend one hot March morning. “Last year some people got just three weeks of work in the whole season. With more machinery around too, the work is done faster.”

Gangrude’s husband is one of the lucky ones. A few years ago, he found a non-farming job as a tailor in the neighbouring town and earned Rs 6,000 last Diwali. But others, especially the village’s women, are often left jobless outside of the monsoon--the two-month period when the only farming work of the year is available. “After the plastic ban, an NGO came to the next village and taught the women how to sew cloth bags, petticoats and such things,” Gangudre said. “I would have liked to learn too but they didn't come here; I don’t know how else you can find this kind of work.”

Kamal Gangrude, 35, with her son in Pimplad village of Maharashtra's northwestern Nashik district. In the backdrop are the fields that used to provide a steady supply of farm jobs, but have now been sold to developers, thus restricting employment options for the village’s poor.

Like the villagers of Pimplad, an increasing number of women in Indian villages are being left with little employment options, except low-paid and erratic farm work. The number of female agricultural labourers in India increased by 24% between 2001 and 2011, even as 7.7 million farmers left farming, indicating how any limited, non-farming opportunities are increasingly being taken up by men, who are perceived as higher-skilled, better educated and more able to migrate for work.

This ‘feminisation of agriculture’ is “not to be celebrated”, said Ishita Mehrotra, assistant professor at Ambedkar University, Delhi, because farm jobs keep women confined to “low paid, insecure and oppressive labour relations”. Agricultural work is indicative of “a patriarchal ideology and a socio-cultural value system” that keeps women bound to the village and consumed with domestic work, while gender roles allow men to migrate for economic and social reasons, she said.