The feminisation of agriculture reflects a gendered structural transformation in India. Discuss its causes and its implications for rural women's empowerment.

Feminisation of agriculture means women make up a growing share of farm work as men leave it. ICRIER's The Participation Paradox finds that rural women in crop and animal production nearly doubled, from 54 million to over 100 million (2017-18 to 2025). Over the same period, rural men's share in agriculture fell from 54.1% to 47.2% [1]. India's structural transformation is therefore gendered: men are moving into non-farm work while women take their place on the farm.

Causes

• Male out-migration: Men are taking non-farm jobs, and women take over the family plot to keep it running [1].
• Distress, not opportunity: Nearly two-thirds of employment added after 2019 was self-employment. Most of it was done by unpaid women family workers, especially in rural areas [2].
• Unpaid care burden: Women spend 289 minutes a day on unpaid domestic work, compared with 88 minutes for men [3]. Only work near home fits around it.
• Few non-farm routes: Women have limited skills training, limited mobility and few rural manufacturing jobs, which keeps them in farming.
• Better counting: Part of the rise is work in fields and cattle sheds that surveys used to miss and now record [1].

Implications for empowerment

Positive

• Visibility: Work that is counted can enter policy and budgets. This is the basis for gender budgeting [1].
• Greater role: Running the farm while men are away can widen women's say in farm and household decisions.

Negative

• Employed but unpaid: Unpaid family workers count as employed yet earn no wage of their own. The ILO calls this the most vulnerable form of self-employment [2].
• Double burden: Farm work is added on top of housework, not swapped for it [1][3].
• Recognition gap: Women rarely hold land titles, so they struggle to get credit, insurance and scheme benefits as farmers.
• Reverse transformation: Women are moving into the lowest-productivity sector just as men leave it [1].

Feminisation of agriculture brings women both visibility and vulnerability. To turn being counted into empowerment, policy should:

• record women as farmers in land records;
• extend the Code on Social Security, 2020 to self-employed women;
• scale up Anganwadi-cum-crèches;
• organise women farmers under DAY-NRLM into cooperatives, which the ILO–SEWA experience shows help with collective bargaining and market access [4].

Together, these steps would make the transformation advance SDG 5 (gender equality) and SDG 8 (decent work), not just inflate employment numbers.