The march of women farmers

Kudiya ta chidiya hundiya ne; par parr ni hunde kudiya de. “My entire life has gone in repaying debts, bringing up my two children, it’s all over for me.” Thousands of women like Bindu and Veerpal spend their lives as farmers but aren’t recognised as such. It defines the term “farmer” as “a person actively engaged in the economic and/or livelihood activity of growing crops and producing other primary agricultural commodities and will include all agricultural operational holders, cultivators, agricultural labourers, sharecroppers, tenants, poultry and livestock rearers, fishers, beekeepers, gardeners, pastoralists, non-corporate planters and planting labourers, as well as persons engaged in various farming related occupations such as sericulture, vermiculture and agro-forestry.” But this definition is a far cry from the reality on the ground, where it’s largely male tillers of land who are considered “farmers”. “One of the things that seems to have helped without it emerging as a feminist thought was that when many agriculture schemes had chunks of subsidies set aside for only small and marginal farmers, or in some cases for women farmers, men started parting with their land and willingly transferring it to create partition titles,” says Kuruganti. “There was only one woman who believed that women deserve rights over land, despite the work they do,” she says.