Sickle and the Superwoman
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Image: Madhu Kapparath for Forbes India
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COMING INTO HER OWN: Farmer Vinita in her fields in Badiya in Theri dsitrict of Uttarakhand
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n Greek mythology, a tribe of women called the Amazons inhabited the island of Themyscira, a world without men. They lived in 1200 B.C. and were immortalised in Homer’s Iliad as the Antianeira — ‘they who fight like men’.
Women in Badiya, a tiny hamlet in the Himalayan foothills, may have never heard of the Amazons or the Iliad. But, they run their villages not much unlike the ancient Greeks — with minimal patriarchal interference.
Rural India is undergoing a gradual change in its social landscape. As more men leave for cities in search of the ‘great urban dream’, women are being thrust into the role of family head, becoming the sole caretaker for everything from farms to parents. According to the Draft National Policy for Women in Agriculture (April, 2008), prepared by the National Commission for Women (NCW), “An estimated 20 percent of rural households are de facto female headed due to widowhood, desertion, or male out-migration.”
Rita Sharma, Secretary, Ministry of Rural Development, says, “We are aware of the phenomenon. Nearly 13 percent of rural households are headed by wo-men today.”
The figures may vary, but it is still considered significant as in the 1970s only about 5 percent of rural households were headed by women, according to a Delhi-based labour economist. It’s not as if women were never involved in agriculture. According to NCW’s draft policy, women constitute 40 percent of the agricultural workforce. But it was the men who took decisions about which crops to grow, how much bank loan to take and whether it was worth pledging the farm to a moneylender.
Now, the women are getting to make some of the decisions. Yet, even as they step into their husbands’ shoes, they have had to face several challenges. The biggest constraint remains less access to land, credit and technical assistance. In addition, they have to battle tradition, and deal with organisations and equipment geared to service men.
Filling the Vacuum
The man-to-woman ratio in Badiya village, in Tehri district of Uttarakhand state, has witnessed a gradual decline over the years and is now approximately 30:70. Joining the army seems to be a favourite option for the men.
Vinita is one such farmer who now heads the household while her husband is away. Her family owns about 400 square metres of farm land. Like before, she gets up at sun rise, tends to the livestock, works on the land, and also looks after her three young children and aged mother-in-law. But the difference is that she’s the boss now. She sells the surplus and uses the money for household expenses.
But Vinita is an exception here rather than the norm. Most women in a similar position take over production of food crops for home consumption rather than for the market.
The women of Badiya still don’t have a say in property rights. That means they can’t negotiate with banks or micro-finance organisations. In any case their holdings are so fragmented and the scale of their farming so small that they don’t pledge the land.
The vacuum created by the men leaving the villages has forced the women to come together. In Badiya, the women have formed a self help group to address common problems.
They pooled in their meagre funds to buy fertilisers and other inputs. As this co-operation helped increase farm productivity, though marginally, the women began to sell whatever little surplus they grew each season. Over a period of time, they had enough to pool in Rs. 320 each to set up a shop of their own which became the first one to make daily provisions available to the hamlet.
A similar pooling of resources is helping women in villages around the town of Doddaballapur in Karnataka. Under the government’s Stree Shakthi programme, self help groups of women pool in funds, from which money is lent to those in need.
These self help groups are also successfully challenging the patriarchal land ownership. In some cases, men have added their wives’ names as co-owners of their land. Where such joint ownership doesn’t materialise, help comes in the form of a pool-in fund run by the self-help groups. However, in the total number of title deeds, women account for just 10 to 20 percent of ownership, according to N. Venkata Reddy, state vice-president of the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha, a farmer’s movement.
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