The farmer India refuses to see

Invisible farmers mean suppressed rural demand and an urban jobs emergency.

Last month, a private member’s Bill was tabled in the Rajya Sabha that, if enacted, would begin to undo one of the most consequential policy failures in independent India’s history.

The National Commission for the Entitlements and Welfare of Women Farmers Bill, 2026, proposes to delink the definition of ‘farmer’ from land ownership, accept a gram panchayat certificate as sufficient proof of farming activity, and extend entitlements — including the Kisan Credit Card — to landless cultivators, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and pastoralists.

It picks up, almost verbatim, the definitional revolution that M S Swaminathan attempted 15 years ago with his Women Farmers’ Entitlements Bill 2011, which lapsed in the Rajya Sabha.

This Bill deserves support. But the problem it addresses — the invisibility of women who farm — is the gender face of something larger. India’s entire marginal farmer population, male and female, is structurally invisible to the policy architecture that is supposed to serve it.

This invisibility is not a data gap to be corrected. It is an unprecedented drag on national GDP, rural consumption, urban employment, and India’s capacity to achieve the eight-fold increase in per capita income that NITI Aayog considers necessary for developed-nation status by 2047.

Consider the numbers. A 100 million marginal farmer households — cultivators operating on less than one hectare — constitute 68.5 per cent of all operational holdings in India. They operate on 24 per cent of the cultivated area with an average holding of 0.38 hectares — a figure unchanged in four decades.

The NSS 77th Round Situation Assessment Survey (2018-2019) records that these households earn between Rs 6,650 and Rs 8,171 per month. Over 50 per cent carry outstanding debt averaging Rs 74,121. Only 52 per cent of paddy farmers among them can sell their crop at all; of those who sell, three-quarters go through local traders, not formal procurement channels.

The gender dimension sharpens the picture. The PLFS 2023-2024 records that 76.95% of rural women workers are engaged in agriculture. An ICAR study found women performing 75 per cent of crop production work, 79 per cent in horticulture, and 95 per cent in animal husbandry and fisheries.

Yet the Agriculture Census 2015-2016 records only 13.96 per cent of operational holdings under women’s names, on just 11.72 per cent of the total area. Of the 9.35 crore farmers receiving PM-KISAN income support, only 2.15 crore are women. The gap between who farms and who is recognised as a farmer has never been wider.

These are not people on the margins of the economy. They are the economy — or would be, if the policy apparatus recognised them. The FAO estimated that closing the gender gap in agriculture alone could raise output by 2.5-4 per cent in developing countries and reduce hunger by 100-150 million people.

Now extend the calculation from gender to the full spectrum of marginal-farmer exclusion — credit, extension, seeds, irrigation, market access — affecting 100 million holdings. The foregone agricultural GDP runs into hundreds of billions of rupees annually.

The invisible majority

How did the majority become invisible? Through a traceable sequence of choices. The colonial land revenue system conflated ‘farmer’ with ‘title-holder’. The first Agricultural Census (1970-1971) classified holdings by size but anchored enumeration to land records — records that in much of eastern India have not been updated since the 1960s.

The green revolution channelled public investment — HYV seeds, fertilisers, irrigation, credit, MSP procurement — through irrigated regions and capitalised farmers. Marginal cultivators in rainfed areas were structurally locked out.

The one programmatic attempt to address this — the Small Farmer Development Agency and Marginal Farmer and Agricultural Labourers Agency, established in 1971 — was dissolved in 1980 into the generic poverty-alleviation architecture of the IRDP.

The marginal farmer ceased to be a production-side policy subject and became a consumption-side welfare beneficiary. The agricultural specificity of their challenge — soil, water, inputs, markets — vanished from the institutional vocabulary.

A vicious cycle

The Swaminathan Commission tried to reverse this exclusion. It proposed a comprehensive, gender-neutral definition of ‘farmer’ that the 2026 Bill echoes — one that includes landless labourers, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, fisherfolk, and livestock rearers.

The shift to ‘farmer welfare’ deepened the paradox. PM-KISAN requires land documentation, excluding between 2.4 crore and 5.37 crore tenant and landless farming families.

The Kisan Credit Card requires a title. Crop insurance requires documented holding. The welfare paradigm, running on the same colonial-era evidentiary infrastructure, reproduces the same exclusions it was meant to correct.

The national consequences cascade. Depressed marginal-farmer income means depressed rural consumption — the rural-urban MPCE gap remains at 70%. This suppresses demand for local non-farm goods and services, fuels distress migration, worsens labour scarcity in agriculture, and drives further productivity decline. The vicious cycle is complete.

Between 2004-2005 and 2009-2010, 23.7 million left agricultural employment — 22.5 million of them unpaid family workers. They became the construction labourers and gig workers whose precarity the pandemic laid bare. India’s ‘jobs crisis’ is substantially a marginal-farmer crisis — distress-driven exit from non-viable smallholdings converting a rural production problem into an urban employment emergency.

Smart investing

However, investing in marginal farmers may be less fiscally demanding than the current agricultural support architecture. Marginal farmers are disproportionately present in high-value agriculture — horticulture, livestock, poultry, fisheries, and spices.

The NSS data confirms that smaller landholders derive more income from livestock than from cultivation. India is the world’s largest milk producer and the second-largest producer of fruits and vegetables — sectors dominated by marginal producers who receive virtually no targeted support.

These are largely non-MSP sectors. They do not require price support from the central pool, FCI procurement, or the massive food subsidy bill that accompanies the rice-wheat regime. What marginal farmers need is market access, cold chains, aggregation, quality inputs, and credit — investments that generate returns through market transactions, not subsidy dependence.

A modest income increase of Rs 2,000 per month across 100 million households would inject Rs 2.4 lakh-crore annually into the rural economy — at the near-unity marginal propensity to consume that characterises these income levels, nearly every rupee would circulate locally.

Conclusion

The 2026 women farmers Bill is a welcome development — particularly its provision for gram panchayat certification, the delinking of entitlements from land title, and the mandate for gender-disaggregated enumeration. Maharashtra’s parallel announcement of a state-level women farmers Bill, with provisions for drone training and AI in farming, signals that the political ground is shifting.

But the Bill, as currently conceived, addresses the gender dimension of a wider structural exclusion. The definitional revolution it proposes — recognising farming activity rather than land ownership as the basis of farmer identity — needs to extend to the full marginal-farmer population: male and female, owner and tenant, documented and undocumented. The institutional infrastructure exists, but what is missing is convergence: the deliberate alignment of credit, extension, market linkage, and digital infrastructure around the marginal farmer as the primary agricultural policy subject.

India cannot become a developed nation by 2047 while rendering invisible the 100 million households that constitute the majority of its agricultural workforce, the base of its rural demand pyramid, and the source of its largest migration flows. Swaminathan understood this in 2011. The new Bill acknowledges it for women. The logic demands extending it to all. The marginal farmer is not a welfare beneficiary requiring a subsidy. They are the most consequential lever India is not pulling. The path to Viksit Bharat runs through their fields, or it does not run at all.

(The author Anish Kumar is a co-founder at Transform Rural India.)

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)