Vol 5. Unequal Land Rights and Feminization of Agriculture in South Asia + Gendered Impact of India's New Farm Laws
Why do women own so little land in South Asia despite being the majority of the farmers? How will India's new farm laws disproportionately affect women?
For our fifth issue, we touch upon the news in South Asia, look at the impact of the new farm bills proposed by India on women farmers, the invisibility of female farmers and inequitable land rights and inheritance across South Asia.
Best,
Bansari Kamdar
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News from South Asia
Bhutan lawmakers have decriminalized sodomy and other forms of “sexual conduct that is against the order of nature.” Bhutan had borrowed its language on the criminalization of gay sex from neighboring India’s colonial-era penal code. India similarly struck down its own law in 2018.
The Crime Bureau of India (CBI) has charged four men with the murder and gangrape of a Dalit woman in Hathras. This comes despite the current Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Adityanath painting the horrific incident as an “international conspiracy” and leaders from Bajrang Dal, RSS, Karni Sena and Prime Minister Modi’s own Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) leaders had organized a rally in support of those accused of the brutal gangrape. The victim’s family was surrounded by police for days and her body burnt in the middle of the night by the Uttar Pradesh police without her family’s consent. Another BJP leader and a former Hathras MLA had also demanded justice for the accused. Anchors from news channels like Zee News, Republic and other channels also claimed that there was no gangrape. Journalist Siddique Kappan was arrested by the UP police while on his way to cover the case and had been in jail for over 40 days without any access to a lawyer.
As the toll of COVID-19 rises in Nepal, female soldiers are breaking taboos by cremating bodies. Women touching a dead body is a taboo in the Hindu-majority country but things have been improving since 2006 after a decade-long conflict and the end of the feudal monarchy.
For the Guernica Magazine, Amna Chaudhry writes about what the past year has been like for garment workers in Pakistan under COVID-19, particularly looking at how they have been refused protection by the state, industrialists and international brands such as H&M. Chaudhry underscores the heightened surveillance that workers face both in online and offline spaces and how garment workers are pushing back. She looks at how factors like violence in factories, a contract system that ensures workers remain expendable, rising inflation and the recent draconian cyber laws such as PECA affect these workers.
After months of public outrage over the recent Lahore motorway gangrape case, where a mother of two was raped at gunpoint in front of her children on the motorway, Pakistan has recently introduced a rape law that will create special courts to try cases within four months and create anti-rape cells to provide medical examinations within six hours of a complaint being made.
Karima Baloch, a Pakistani human rights activist and refugee from Balochistan, living in Canada went missing over the weekend and has been found dead. After fleeing Pakistan, she had continued her fight in Toronto against the "enforced disappearances and state operations" in her hometown. Once while standing in court for charges against her for her activism, the judge told her he was minded to give her a more lenient sentence because she was a woman. Karima declined and said, “If you are going to punish me, you should do that on the basis of equality - do not give me that concession because of my gender.”
Deep Dive #1: Women Farmers May Bear the Disproportionate Cost of India’s New Farm Laws
India is already undergoing an agrarian crisis. This is evident in the declining plot sizes, food price inflation, degraded soils and water resources, declining accessibility to traditional seeds and other inputs, increasing production costs relative to farm incomes and the rising farmer suicides. The most affected and vulnerable to this crisis - the women - continue to be overlooked in policy considerations.
At this moment, the largest protests in human history - nearly 250 million people - are on the streets of India protesting the new farm bills. For over a month, hundreds of thousands of farmers have camped on the road to India’s national capital New Delhi, undeterred by the cold, COVID-19 and crackdowns by the police.
The three farm bills were passed by the Prime Minister’s Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government through a controversial voice vote in Rajya Sabha in September 2020. Farmers have expressed concern that the farm laws designed to deregulate India’s agriculture sector do not include a Minimum Support Price (MSP). An MSP is a minimum price guaranteed by the government at which farmers can sell their crops. Farmers fear that without MSP they will have to participate in contract farming with private corporations. These laws also remove restrictions on companies buying land and stockpiling goods and disallow farmers to approach civil courts for resolution.
“Women are both vulnerable and powerful – victimized and empowered – through food,” anthropologist Penny van Esterik once famously said.
Many women are at the forefront of these protests. Professor Mallika Kaur writes that young women who joined the protest “are committed to women claiming, co-creating, and sharing space for a better future—a future that centers women’s voices, representation and rights.”
In India, 73 percent of the full-time rural workers in the agricultural sector are women, compared to 59 percent for men. Moreover, 81 percent of the female agricultural laborers belong to marginalized communities like Dalits, Adivasis and OBC communities. Women also contribute substantially to subsistence farming and carry out a high proportion of labor within farming households.
Despite making a large proportion of the rural farmers in South Asia, very few women hold any land, ranging from 4.8% in Bangladesh to 12.8 percent in India. Many women are involved in unpaid work on family farms or as casual laborers.
The new policies will affect Indian women more adversely than men. These laws, particularly the reversal of MSP will shift the agriculture from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market where small farmers - usually women and those from marginalized communities - will either have to sell to big farmers reinstating feudal arrangements of past or big corporates. The new laws offer little mechanism to prevent the exploitation of farmers through unfair contracts.
As the agrarian crisis intensifies across the country, there is a rise in men’s migration to cities in search of higher incomes and opportunities, while women are left behind in villages to take over multiple agricultural roles - a feminization of agricultural labor in India and an increase in the proportion of rural women-headed households.
Itishree Pattnaik, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, Stewart Lockie and Bill Pritchard argue that it is not just feminization of agriculture but feminization of agrarian distress. They find close ties between women’s increasing share of participation in agriculture and the severe agrarian crisis engulfing the country, highlighting what Martha E. Gimenez once described as the “feminization of poverty.”
Women’s increased work in agriculture is not accompanied by any reduction in their already disproportionate burden of unpaid labor and carework for children and the elderly in the household. According to India’s first and only Time Use Survey in 2019, rural women spend nearly 2.5 times as much time as men on domestic work and primary carework. Additionally, a growing proportion of women employed in the agriculture sector are not even paid for their work. Female agriculture workers earned 1.4 times lower than male counterparts, according to a report on Gender Responsive Budgeting in Agriculture by UN Women.
And still, their work remains invisible. They continue to have little rights over the land they cultivate.
It is only in 2005 that the Hindu Succession Act was amended in India to give Hindu women equal inheritance rights to agricultural land. However, issues of implementation have largely undermined the impact of the reform.
Without land titles, women farmers have very little access to credit, are barred from government schemes to support farmers or extension programs, and more. In Uttar Pradesh, one Oxfam study found that only 6 percent of women own land, less than 1 percent have participated in government training programs, 4 percent have access to institutional credit and only 8 percent have control over agricultural income.
We see a similar policy paralysis and erasure of female farmers when it comes to farmer suicides. Farmer suicides have increased exponentially in India since its liberalization. In the past 25 years, over 350,000 farmers have committed suicide to escape the vicious circle of poverty, debt, and humiliation due to factors like privatization of agriculture, unsustainable debt and climate change.
Nearly 85 percent of these suicides are men. There is little data about female farmer suicides. In some Indian states like Maharashtra, debts have led to the doubling of suicides in the last four years among female farmers.
Widows of farmers who commit suicide also lack access to the land they cultivated. A 2018 survey by the Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch finds that 40 percent of the women widowed by farmer suicides between 2012 and 2018 were yet to obtain rights to the farmland they cultivated. Additionally, only 35 percent of these widows secured the rights to their family house and 33 percent did not even know that they were entitled to a pension.
The erasure of women’s work in agriculture is also evident in the government budget and planning. In the 2018-2019 budget, the Indian Ministry of Agriculture allocated just 2% for women farmers of its 57,600 crore budget.
The new farm bills also push for the development of e-NAM, or electronic National Agriculture Market, which could leave women out due to the digital gender divide and women’s lack of access to technology in India. The recent National Family Health Survey (NHFS) study found that less than 3 out of 10 women in rural India and 4 out of 10 women in urban India have ever used the Internet.
The NHFS survey also found a disturbing reversal of the trend of reducing child malnutrition including the worsening in key nutrition indicators such as childhood stunting, wasting and underweight in the last five years under the current government. At a time like this, the Essential Commodities Act, one of the farm bills passed by the BJP with a voice vote, removes cereals, potatoes and pulses from the list of essential commodities, encouraging hoarding of food grains by corporates while malnutrition and hunger remains high among rural poor women and children.
Deep Dive #2: Women’s Land Rights and Inheritance in South Asia
Women in South Asia account for more than half the agricultural workforce in comparison to the global average of 26 percent. The Maldives and Sri Lanka are the exceptions to this trend with 2 percent and 27 percent respectively. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) finds that in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, the share of economically active women working in farming now ranges from 60-98 percent.
Past research has shown that women’s increased representation in agriculture does not always contribute to their socio-economic empowerment. We also saw that earlier in the case of India and its feminization of rural poverty.
This is partly due to their invisibility as farmers. For instance, in Pakistan’s Punjab Province, rice production is heavily dependent on women’s unpaid and low-valued labor despite men being considered the principal rice farmers, finds one study by the FAO. Women are engaged in backbreaking physical tasks such as seed transplanting and weeding, often considered too harsh for men, according to Tehseen Nizami Samira Qazi and Shazia Hina.
The erasure of women’s farm work means that they are performing backbreaking work on farms alongside their heavy unpaid labor burden. All the while, a growing proportion of them are not paid at all for their work.
A major factor contributing to this is inequitable land rights in South Asia. Globally, more than 400 million women farm, yet only about 15% of farmland is owned by women, according to Landesa, a land rights organization.
Despite women’s disproportionate presence in agriculture in South Asia, access to land remains limited and uneven. In South Asia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and Maldives do not provide for equal inheritance rights for sons and daughters. As in the case of India above, we see that even in countries without legal barriers, access to land for women remains low and uneven.
Secure land rights for women have snowballing benefits. For instance, in India, when two states initially reformed the Hindu Succession Act in 1994 to allow equal inheritance for men and women, mothers that benefited from these reforms spent twice as much on their daughters’ education. These women were also more likely to have bank accounts, sanitary toilets and the legislation led to an improvement in girls’ education attainment. Another study found that there was an 11 percent increase in women moving from subsistence farming to selling crops from their land due to secure land rights in India.
Women are also more likely to gain control over household decisions if they own land. In Nepal, 37 percent of women who owned land had the final say on a household decision, compared to 20 percent of women who did not own land. According to a study by Siwan Anderson and Mukesh Eswaran, it is not paid employment that increases the female farmer’s autonomy but employment outside of their husbands’ farms in Bangladesh.
There is some patriarchial backlash of increased inheritance rights. One study by Daniel Rosenblum finds that if parents desire to maximize their bequest to the son, then giving daughters inheritance rights increases the cost of daughters, causing parents to reduce investment in their daughters’ health, leading to an increase in female child mortality.
Studies have also found that many women are unaware of these rights and those who are aware fear antagonizing local power holders and family members by pushing for inheritance. In situations like these, Rachel Brule’s new book Women, Power and Property finds that increasing women’s political participation in India helped women navigate their economic rights at home.
When women do control land, it is not just smaller in size but also of lower quality than that held by men. For instance, in countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan, the average size of land holdings by male-headed households is twice that of households headed by women.
Oxfam finds that nearly 56 percent of India's female workforce involved in agriculture is in dryland regions, making them more vulnerable. Women farmers also have less access to resources and opportunities. FAO also finds that just closing this gender gap in agriculture would increase yields on women’s farms by 20-30 percent and total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 to 4 percent.
Sociologist Elisa Scalise finds that a major impediment to land ownership and inheritance is the practice of dowry in South Asia. The family often views their daughter’s dowry, given to her husband and his family, as her inheritance. Despite being prohibited by law, the cultural practice remains prevalent in the region.
Other obstacles to women’s land inheritance include patrilocal post-marital residence; marriage practices like polygyny in many South Asian countries that allow Sharia law and even polyandry in some regions of Nepal that may impact inheritance; discriminatory formal and customary laws; women’s limited mobility and the practice of purdah; lack of education or awareness and widespread landlessness in the region.
Postcards of Courage: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay
A socialist feminist, Kamaldevi was an important figure who advocated for the empowerment of Indian women and political independence. At 27, she convinced Gandhi to include women in the salt satyagraha and marched alongside the freedom fighters against the British, opening the doors wide for women’s participation in India’s freedom struggle.
A natural polymath, she wrote over 18 books, acted in the Kannadiga cinema, and was one of the first women to run for office in pre-independence Madras. Her politics was personal - hers was the first divorce granted by the Indian court of law and she was also the few child widows who went against social norms to remarry.
Post-independence, she dedicated her life to the revival of traditional arts and crafts of the country leading to globally renowned institutes like the National School of Drama, Bharatiya Natya Sangha, Lady Irwin College, Sangeet Natak Academy, Central Cottage Industries Emporium, World Craft Council, Craft Council of India, and the Delhi Craft Council and more.
Kamaladevi was also instrumental in the rehabilitation of Pakistani refugees who came in after the partition. She led the building of the city of Faridabad to rehabilitate over 50,000 craftsmen who had crossed the border.
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Bansari Kamdar is an independent journalist and researcher at the Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy. She is pursuing a post-graduate degree in Applied Economics and has a Master’s degree from Boston University in International Relations and International Journalism. Kamdar reports on gender, immigration, security, and political economy in South Asia. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Diplomat, Huffington Post, CNN-News18, and more.
Anushka Sharma is a research assistant for the Newspaperwali and is pursuing her Bachelor’s in Communications and Journalism from Bennett University. Sharma believes in experiential learning and is interested in public policy and development.