India: Women, The Farmer, and The Agitator
By Ritwija Dutta, Undergraduate Student of International Relations at Jadavpur University, India
If we trace the history of agriculture in the history of civilization, we can see that women were the first cultivators; the first farmers. Around ten thousand years ago, while men went out hunting and gathering edibles, women stayed in a place with children. Realising how a seed can grow into a plant, by emulating the natural phenomenon, they started to grow plants.
Many historians agree that because of this agriculture, the accumulation and augmentation of property (farm products at that time) began, and the patriarchy also became an essential form of society, to propagate property to the next generation, and requiring the maintenance of genetic lineage, as well as the domestication of women.
Now in the News…
Fast forward ten thousand years, there's a huge farmers' protest going on in the agricultural nation India, where farmers are mainly protesting against three bills passed in Parliament, which are:
Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020
The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020
Essential Commodities( Amendment) Act, 2020
These acts will open the road for more and more privatization, and lessen the responsibility of government to provide security for the farmers. The more ease the corporations are given to deal with the farmers, the less the farmers will get a chance to bargain and voice protest. The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act removes items like edible oil, onion and potato from the list of essential commodities, which means the government will no longer regulate their production, supply and distribution. Only the Central government can regulate the supply or deem any item “essential”, that too under “extraordinary circumstances” (Here it is ‘war’ and ‘famine’, as mentioned in the bill). It also says that any action on imposing stock limits will be based on price rises. Farmers fear that if the government withdraws from regulation, corporations will bulk purchase and hoard essential commodities to sell them at high rates.
The Impact of these Laws on Women
These laws are obviously detrimental to farmers, but specifically, they are far more dangerous for women farmers, as they are on the receiving end of the unequal agricultural practices. In India, the recent study by Periodic Labour Force Survey 2017-18 (PLFS) shows that 73.2% of rural women workers are engaged in agriculture, but women own only 12.8% of landholdings.
But the earnings and profits from agriculture are often not provided to women, even if they own land in their names. Even data may be biased also, as we don’t see women as farmers; women are often seen as housewives. Rather, they are silent, unpaid or underpaid labourers, or working in a family field, without any recognition. Though there are some provisions for institutional incentives provided to the women farmers, it rarely sees any ground-level implementation, because of low-level of awareness in rural women.
Women are helpless in various ways in the agricultural sector, but when the government denies playing its part in securing their future, the farmer’s future, the future of the nation becomes blurred. And the essential commodities law acts as a direct barrier to women’s kitchen. Even the institutional safeguards also failed to provide women access to direct profit receiving agent.
Tractors, irrigation systems and machinery to reduce the labour of men were introduced by male policy-makers, but many of the jobs done by women—such as sowing, weeding, hoeing, grass cutting, picking, cotton stick collection, separation of seeds from fiber, tending to livestock—remained the way they had for centuries.
Types of Women Farmers in India
In states like Punjab and Haryana, there are large-scale farmers, whose main source of income is from cultivating acres of land. Sometimes their whole family is engaged in farming.
But if we see parts of west Bengal, the landholding is smaller, and due to the ongoing agrarian crisis, many people are turning away from farming, so they are migrating towards the urban areas, or metropolitan cities to find jobs. And their family lands are being tended by the women who stay at home and take care of the man’s family.
Again, in Telengana, due to high level of consciousness, approximately 30% of women own lands and cultivate.
There is also another type where women work as unpaid or underpaid labourers in the fields of large-scale landowners, or they take lease of the land, and cultivate the land and return it at the end of the lease period.
The case of Dalit (scheduled caste) women farmers are even worse as they don’t come under the purview of farmers. These women are mostly engaged in sowing, weeding and collecting fruits, mahua flowers, tendu leaves and grass used for brooms. But they are not recognized at all for this. Even if they get their legal rights for the land, mostly they cannot enjoy it, the recognition is only in papers, yet the land-holding is actually owned and controlled by local landlords.
Women Farmers’ Suicide
Around 50,000 women farmers’ suicides have been reported from 1995 to 2018, the foremost reason is being unable to repay the loan, low output from the field etc. Among the reported numbers, 80% of farmers were men, yet their widows have a hard time in repaying the loan. Also, it’s a long battle to earn the inheritance rights of their dead husbands. Most women are not even aware of their rights. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) does not classify suicides as rural and urban, notes a report published by MAKAAM (Mahila Kisan Adhikaar Manch, a forum that works to secure recognition for, and the rights of women farmers). It is, therefore, not possible to know how many of the “suicides of housewives” that are reported annually (nearly double the number of farmer suicides) are from rural India. In the case of suicides, the women are neither recognised as farmers nor as farmer widows. Often, they are even blamed for the deaths of the men.
Double Burden of Women Farmers
Not only do the women farmers have to work in the fields, but they have also shoulder the burden of child care, and home care. This unpaid domestic work makes women vulnerable in the fields. Between 2016 and 2019, more than 4,500 women agricultural labourers underwent hysterectomies in the Maharshtra sugarcane farms so that they don’t need to worry about periods and the subsequent non-payment days. Most women farmers are illiterate, which affects negatively in their health and economic status as well as productivity. Women are expected to work through pregnancies and menstrual cycles, often for 16 hours a day, since any absence results in heavy penalties from contractors. Even pregnant women scarcely leave the field, and there’s even a noted case where a woman gave birth to a child in the field.
The Women Farmers’ Protest and the Solidarity from Other Women
When we say farmers, we tend to think of a middle-aged man. But the recent ongoing protests in Delhi show that we’re very wrong in our perceptions. Though the protest has been going on for around four months, it started in mid-August, in different pockets of Punjab and Haryana. When the government paid no heed to their demands, at the end of November they marched towards Delhi. As I am writing this, it’s the 21st day of the protest at Delhi, the national capital.
Now there are around more than 20,000 women farmers protesting at the site. The shared experience of girl students, college students, children, elderly women from different parts of Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh is unique in every sense.
A Day in the Protest Site, through the Eyes of Women
At the protest site also, women are not exempted from their duty to cook, though men are also lending a hand in the work. Here, preparing food is no longer a chore, it has become a shared community-experience. Women are shouting slogans, singing songs, tending to children. They are juggling everything in one hand.
But there are loads of problems faced by women at the protest site. There’s lack of proper toilet facilities and women wake up before dawn to wash under a makeshift shade made by saree, and many of the women use a makeshift toilet for urination and defecation. Their menstrual health has also been compromised, and now there’s a drive going on to provide sanitary napkins to the women.
Many women are taking a daily trip to the protest site to support the protests. They are returning to their homes to take care of their family fields, to water the fields, provide food to the cattle and take care of their children or elderly persons at home. Women are also preoccupied with participating in local, small-scale protests – in front of toll plazas and corporate malls – back in Punjab. The momentum, the women feel, must not be allowed to slow down. Some are taking their newborn babies to the protest site. They’re juggling between their home duties and the protest, because they think it’s also another very important duty and they’re not shying away from getting into the national capital in these cold nights to show solidarity as well as vouching for their rights in the streets.
Our women are rising in new power; they are battling against the age-old patriarchy at home as well as in streets against the very patriarchal state machinery.
Now it’s time to celebrate our power once again, in these dark days, let the power of our women farmers be cherished and upheld by all.