Women farmers' woes to fore

NOIDA: About 300 women farmers, academics and researchers on Wednesday gathered for a three-day 'Women's Parliament' to discuss issues pertaining to women farmers in the country.
Farmers from Vidarbha in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh participated in the programme, which was organized by the Amity Institute of Social Sciences on the university campus.The participants also included farmers' widows.
Padma Shri awardee and development economist Bina Agarwal chaired the inaugural session. She said that in the Indian agricultural system, women play a significant role in crop production and livestock management. "Despite their contribution to agricultural production, women face severe handicaps. They are unaware of their rights," she said.
Suvarna Damle of Prakriti, an NGO that works with farmers' widows, said
there were mainly two reasons for farmers' suicides. "They incur debt which remains unpaid. Low production of agricultural crops also lead to such situations," said Damle who conducted a survey on 200 farm widows in Vidharbha to know how they survive after their husbands committed suicide.
She said that most widows did not even know where their lands were. "Most farm widows do not know how much debt their husbands had borrowed and how much was paid. They do not know how to repay the debt. There is need for massive awareness," Damle said.
Mahinda Kaur, a farmer from Hoshiyarpur in Punjab, said that she has been in the business for 10 years and faces many problems. "The fields are located 3km away from my home. Every day I have to walk to the fields and back," she said, adding that she doesn't feel safe once it gets dark.
The farmers also said that there was a bias against women farmers in society.
"We do not get a good price for our crops whereas the same products are sold at higher rates by male farmers," said Sonali Gajanan, a woman farmer from Amravati in Maharashtra who grows kapas (cotton).
Mayfereen Ryrtathiarj, who works for a farmers' group in Meghalaya, agreed that the women farmers get low wages as compared to men. "The crops grown by them do not fetch good prices. The women are also supposed to do household chores after farming, which is not the case with men."