The Economic Survey 2017-18 says that there is feminization of the agriculture sector with an increasing number of women in multiple roles as cultivators, entrepreneurs, and labourers. The Agriculture sector employs 80 per cent of all economically active women in India. In rural India, 85% of women are engaged in agriculture.
Factors driving feminization of the agriculture sector in India:

• Migration of men: Owing to various factors like agrarian distress, better employment opportunities and wages, men mostly migrate from rural areas to cities or from agricultural states to industrial states, thus leaving behind women to handle the agriculture.
• Low cost of production: Women are more willing to accept low paid irregular work and are easy to hire and fire especially in rural areas. Thus, compared to men more women are engaged as labour in the agriculture sector as it is a labour intensive sector.
• Socio-cultural factors: Women are given less preference when it comes to education and skill development. So they tend to participate more in the low skilled labour force of the agriculture sector. Also, due to the patriarchal mindset of the society, they are prevented from moving out and joining non-agricultural works.

Effects of the feminization of agriculture:

• It brings women into the public sphere and allows them to socialize with various communities. e with v
• It makes their labour visible and can potentially lead to building of women’s skill and confidence.
• It has given them the opportunity to organize and enhance their bargaining power.
• It has also led to increased burden as women have to carry household chores, which undermine their wellbeing.

However, they face various challenges like difficulties in use of technology, credit access due to non-availability of land holdings, and accessing market information. Women have been confined to traditional, low paying roles such as winnowing, harvesting, which furthers the gender economic disparity.
Women can be more empowered in this context in the following ways:

• Ownership of land: Only 13 percent rural women engaged in agriculture own land. Giving ownership rights will help them in accessing benefits under multiple agriculture schemes that are reserved for landowners.
• Women centric extensive service: Adapting extension services to the needs of women farmers will be beneficial. Under farm mechanization, a focus on innovating farm machines that are better suited to females should be given.
• Gender budgeting: In 2020-21, only 5 per cent of the total budget was sensitive to gender neutral outcomes and focused specifically on women-centric schemes, which need to be increased to provide more incentives to women.
• Role of civil society: They can organize agrarian women into collectives, educating them about their rights, enabling access to the state and giving them sustainable livelihood training.
• Alternative economic opportunities: Schemes like MGNREGA and NRLM will empower them in negotiating wages.

With women predominant at all levels of production, pre-harvest, post-harvest processing, packaging, marketing of the agricultural value chain, it is imperative to adopt gender specific interventions. An inclusive transformative agricultural policy should aim at gender-specific interventions to raise productivity of small farm holdings, and integrate women as active agents in rural transformation.