Agriculture being a State subject, examine the constitutional and administrative challenges in enacting a uniform Central law for women farmers' rights.

After Maharashtra became the first State to legislate exclusively for women farmers in July 2026, the EAC-PM Chairman indicated that the Centre is examining a similar law [5]. Since agriculture and land fall squarely in the State List, a uniform Central statute faces both competence-related and delivery-related hurdles.

Constitutional challenges

• Legislative competence: Agriculture (Entry 14) and land, tenancy and land records (Entry 18) are State List subjects under the Seventh Schedule, barring direct Union legislation [1].
• Enabling routes are fragile: Parliament can act only via Article 249 (Rajya Sabha resolution), Article 252 (consent of two or more States) or by anchoring the law in Concurrent entries — each is temporary or politically contingent.
• Personal-law fragmentation: Inheritance rights flow from the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, which made daughters coparceners but binds only Hindus [4]; a uniform entitlement law must sidestep uneven succession regimes.
• Enabling provisions such as Article 15(3) and DPSP Article 39(a) permit affirmative action but confer no independent legislative competence.

Administrative challenges

• Defining a "farmer": Maharashtra's Women Farmer Certificate delinks recognition from land title, backed by a digital registry, an Empowerment Fund and a Chief Minister-led Governing Council [2]. Replicating this needs harmonised, digitised land and tenancy records, which States maintain unevenly.
• Identification gap: Women form roughly a third of cultivators and over two-fifths of agricultural labourers, yet hold barely a tenth of operational holdings [3] — leaving most outside credit and insurance databases.
• Weak precedent in delivery: The existing mandate of at least 30% scheme expenditure on women farmers under the National Food Security Mission and allied schemes shows targets falter without identification machinery [3].
• Fiscal and design divergence: Funds and registries draw on State budgets; divergent State designs risk fragmentation before any Central framework matures.

The obstacle is therefore less of intent than of constitutional architecture. A model law circulated for State adoption, backed by centrally sponsored incentives and interoperable land-record and registry standards, offers the most workable path — advancing gender justice through cooperative federalism rather than around it.