Take a train from one Indian city to the next. Squeeze through the aisle, dodge a man selling chai from huge kettles and pause near the toilets, where a man is spitting red chewing tobacco into the sink. When he moves, dart to the open door, grasp the worn metal handles and lean out. The wind pummels you, knocking back your fears and thoughts and desires, leaving you nothing but ragged and raw life. You soar through the Indian countryside, one hand clutching the handle and the other outstretched, stroking the delicious air.

Soon, you begin to look at the view. Depending on where you are, it is predominantly green or brown. No matter where you are, you are passing villages. Each village is surrounded by fields. Each field is dotted with women, bent over, hard at work.

“I come from a state where agriculture is the biggest employer so I have vivid memories of fields full of women.” Says Rupa Jha in an article for BBC. “But think about the owner – and it’s always a man who comes to mind.”

But men have been disappearing. Climate change, debt pressure, and Monsanto’s seeds and policies, have led to an astounding number of male farmer suicides in India–one every 30 minutes, according to the LA Times.* Many men also leave farms in order to find more lucrative work in the cities, though they are not always successful.

The women who stay behind are faced with great challenges. They often don’t have ownership of the land they live on, they face increased difficulties with climate change and corporate takeover of resources, and they have to balance farming with their role as a caretaker.

Women Farmers Take the Plough

Difficult it may be, but Indian women farmers still have children to feed. Rupa Jha visited Vaishali, a single mother of two who took over the business of farming in order to support her children. While men didn’t take her seriously at first, she won their respect with her skill and confidence. “She seems to have easily mastered farming, discussing crop cycles, fertiliser and pesticides with confidence and authority. She also makes enough money by selling her produce to keep her teenage son and daughter in school,” says Jha.

There are also Indian women who are choosing to be farmers of their own accord. Jha visits Rimppi Kumari and Karamjit, two Rajasthani sisters who took it upon themselves to generate their own livelihood by tilling the land.

Regardless of their circumstances, the fact remains that more Indian women are heading farms–and rural households–than ever before. Indian women farmers now have a larger workload. But are there advantages to this change?

Indian Women Form Farming Collectives

In 2007, the government launched a program called Kudumbashree to encourage rural women in poverty to form farming collectives. Since that time, Indian women farmers have organized into more than 47,000 farming collectives.

Speaking to The Guardian, the award-winning Palagummi Sainath says, “When you go out into the countryside in India, you find women working alone, cut off from everyone else. They’re working in one small homestead farm here, another there. Bringing them together in a group creates an entirely different dynamic. They gain confidence, and know that if one of them falls ill, the others are there to cover for her.”

The Women’s Collective in Tamil Nadu is a network of NGOs dedicated to empowering women to join together as farmers. A group of up to ten single, abandoned, or widowed women lease a plot of land together. They pay the landowner a percentage of the yield, and use the rest to meet their and their families’ nutritional needs. They also create village seed banks and receive education on the dangers of GMOs and chemicals. While dry weather and over-farmed earth create challenges, these women are still able to feed their families because of the strength and ingenuity they find in working together.

There are many benefits for farming in collectives, including:

1. Better access to resources. Women pool their resources–often including land, time, money and equipment–when they gather in collectives.
2. More social power. While men still hold the titles to most of the land–and thus hold the power in the world of agriculture–a group of women has more negotiating power than individual women.
3. Community. A few days of sickness could be disastrous for a single farmer, but a collective of farmers will look out for one another. Community is nourishing on multiple levels. It makes the days shorter, the hardships easier to bear, and even makes the farming process fun. I wouldn’t be surprised if the high rate of male farmer suicides is in part due to lack of community.
4. Education. Working together, women have the opportunity to learn from one another. Farming collectives that participate in larger networks or are supported by organizations also have access to educational resources that teach sustainable farming methods.

In addition to farming collectives, there are networks of women farmers forming. Vanastree is a collective of organic seed savers, Diverse Women for Diversity is a group of women supporting one another in ending monoculture farming and resisting GMO seeds.

As it turns out, the responsibility of taking over the farm has been empowering for many women. They put the nutritional needs of their families first. “Only what’s left over goes to market. There’s no doubt that when women get greater rights in agriculture, things improve,” says Sainath. Thus they raise healthier children, and are healthier themselves.

Where will it lead?

Farming is both humbling and empowering. Learning to grow food wizens us and gives us power and independence. In a country where men are flocking to cities to join the global economy and women are still fighting for their basic rights, could it be that women will find liberation through the simplest and most basic of tools: food?

But there are so many challenges facing Indian women farmers, even in collectives. Questions whisper at the back of our minds: “Are the women really getting more power, or are they just gnawing on the scraps that will be snatched back as soon as the men see these farms succeeding? Will men honor the success and ingenuity of these women and join with them to create a more nourishing food system, or continue to be separated by their elevated social status?”

But when I imagine the women in the fields, they aren’t worried. They move down the rows, weeding, talking and laughing. One woman stops to breastfeed, and her older daughter continues in her stead. At the end of the row are the Grandmothers, sorting and carrying, holding it all together with their ancient hands.

*It is interesting–and harrowing–to note that farmers in the US are twice as likely to commit suicide than the general population.

—

Written by Nicholas Tippins

Special thanks to Nevil Zaveri, who supplied many of the beautiful photos for this article via Flickr Creative Commons.

P.S.