Women constitute the backbone of Indian agriculture, accounting for nearly three-quarters of the rural female workforce, yet they remain systematically excluded from land rights, institutional support and policy recognition. Drawing on a large mixed-methods study in eight distress-prone districts across Maharashtra, Telangana and Punjab by the Society for Promoting Participative Ecosystem Management (SOPPECOM) and Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch (MAKAAM), this article conceptualises agrarian distress as a form of structural violence against women, which is often unrecognised. Rooted in long-term engagement with women farmers and workers, the analysis moves beyond episodic accounts of violence to examine how caste, gender, labour regimes and ecological change produce everyday, normalised forms of violence. Combining survey data on over 3,000 women with qualitative interviews and collective documentation, the article shows how landlessness, informal labour, debt and state neglect shape women’s work, health and exposure to violence. It concludes by outlining pathways towards a gender-just agrarian transformation grounded in women’s rights, recognition and collective leadership.
For over a century, drought-prone deserts and drylands with seasonal grasses have been viewed as desolate, forsaken spaces waiting to be developed into verdant, bountiful landscapes. Since the 1970s, the aim has been to green the grasslands by introducing thorny exotic plants. The focus was on drought relief through small or large irrigation projects and canals that dissected the lands. Later, this evolved into watershed programmes for soil and water conservation and a new concern with livestock management, banning grazing by small ruminants and encouraging intensive livestock systems centred around large ruminants and exotic cattle. Within these development perspectives, several unique qualities of the drylands remained invisible, including the lives and livelihoods of women farmers and pastoralists. Recently, new perspectives on drylands have emerged, valuing these lands for what they are rather than for what they are not. For centuries, drylands have nurtured and sustained lives and livelihoods. This article offers a fresh perspective on drylands, recognising their intrinsic value and the resilience of women’s livelihoods that revolve around livestock, ways of being and living that have the potential for sustaining communities and landscapes in an uncertain economic and climatic future.
This article will attempt to trace feminist discourses and theoretical perspectives to understand women’s work in the rural economy, largely focused on India and South Asia. This scholarship has drawn from a range of theoretical standpoints, resistance movements and lived experiences of women workers. While historically evolving from Marxist and socialist feminist articulations, eco-feminist perspectives, blended with livelihood perspectives to add value to the framing of women’s roles in the production, reproduction and sustenance of life within households and communities. Feminists have tried to bring conceptual specificity while simultaneously addressing structural questions, be it through the expansive understanding of social reproduction or feminist political ecology. Given the feminist discussions on the need to have an approach integrating the different worlds of work, formal, informal and domestic, the current agrarian distress across several regions has also interrogated the patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies underpinning them. Despite being on the margins of scholarship, feminist approaches have reluctantly been incorporated into mainstream discussions as well as into some policy gestures.
Agroecology (AE) has been widely advanced as an alternative scientific paradigm, a socio-environmental movement and a set of farming practices for mitigating the ecological, social and economic harms associated with chemical-intensive, commercial agriculture. In India, AE has been institutionalised through an array of government schemes, non-governmental interventions and farmer-led initiatives to reduce dependence on external chemical inputs, restore soil health, enhance biodiversity, promote regenerative agricultural practices and encourage the consumption of nutritious food. However, such policies are often unclear about the extent to which social justice is embedded within their design and implementation. Consequently, these interventions are unable to engage with entrenched gender and social inequalities that structure Indian agriculture. This article examines the social relations embedded within agroecological practices to understand their transformative potential. Drawing on three decades of participatory action research conducted by the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in Kannivadi, Tamil Nadu, and by foregrounding the experiences of resource-poor Dalit women farmers, the study highlights both the promise and limitations of AE. While positive ecological and livelihood outcomes are evident, caste and patriarchal structures continue to constrain equitable and just transformation. Addressing these challenges requires formal and informal institutions to explicitly engage with the structures of power, such as caste, class and gender, through an intersectional feminist praxis.
