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Women should form land cooperatives to solve agrarian crisis: Senior Economist

Last Updated 02 March 2020, 16:21 IST

Among cultivators, men get paid twice as much as women, said a senior economist at a Convention on Women and Labour organsied by Gram Seva Sangh and Cntre for Budget and Policy Studies here on Saturday. What is even more worrying is 75% to 80% of women who work on farms are considered family and are unpaid.

"There are few women who own lands and they are mostly widows of farmers who committed suicide because of huge debts. If women have control over lands, they can have control of the crop choice, the technology they would want to use, and have control over how it is marketed. Cooperatives along the lines of Kudambashree in Kerala are the way to go," said Jaya Mehta, Senior Economist, Joshi-Adhikari Institute of Social Sciences, at the Convention.

"Around 40% of those women in agriculture are wage labourers. And the wages for the same work for women is less than men in every state of India. The wage difference is biggest in Kerala which is the most progressive state. A man gets Rs. 600 for a day of unskilled work and a woman gets Rs. 200. In cultivator households, women are unpaid family labour," Mehta said.

Women's work is not accounted for and the land is in the name of the men of the household and is controlled by the men in the household. "The few women who have got control of the land have not got legal control but de facto control are because of men who have committed suicide. More than three lakh farmers have committed suicide. so farm widows are a big number," she said.

The women do not have legal title to their land. They do not even know what debt their husband had taken and from which sources and what promises were made for repaying the debt, she said. "There are also women who have got control over the land because men have migrated out. There are many villages where the entire male labour has walked out in search of better jobs and women, senior citizens and children are left behind with land which is difficult to cultivate," she added.

With no legal control, women cannot get bank loans. But land cooperatives offer hope. "Individual land holdings are very small in which nothing can be grown. So the only way to solve the agrarian crisis is to pool the labour and land together and form cooperatives," Mehta concluded.

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(Published 02 March 2020, 16:21 IST)

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