Towards recognising women farmers

Why in the News

Maharashtra has passed the Women Farmers’ Empowerment Bill. The law grants women independent recognition as farmers irrespective of land ownership, through a Woman Farmer Certificate. It is the first Indian State legislation to give enforceable legal form to the activity-based, land-delinked definition of ‘farmer’. The National Policy for Farmers set that definition out in 2007 and never operationalised it. A comparable central law was introduced in the Rajya Sabha in 2011 and lapsed. The contested point is that recognition as a farmer in India runs through land revenue records, and those records stand primarily in men’s names. The United Nations has named 2026 the International Year of the Woman Farmer.

What is the Woman Farmer Certificate under the Women Farmers’ Empowerment Bill?

1. Land-delinked definition: The Act recognises women residents engaged in agriculture for at least one agricultural season a year, irrespective of the nature of the land. It broadens the definitions of both ‘agriculture’ and ‘farmer’.
2. Woman Farmer Certificate: The certificate is the document that confers an independent agricultural identity on a woman, drawn from what she does rather than from a title in a land record.
3. Categories named in the Act: It explicitly recognises the landless cultivator, the landless livestock rearer, the agricultural labourer, the plantation labourer and the pastoralist.

How far has women’s participation in agriculture outrun their recognition as farmers?

1. Workforce size: In 2025 agriculture employed roughly 110 million women and 127 million men in rural India, on Census adjusted Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) estimates, bringing the sector close to gender parity.
2. Rate of increase: The women’s agricultural workforce has more than doubled since 2017-18.
3. Concentration in agriculture: Nearly three-quarters of all rural women workers are now in agriculture, against less than half of men.
4. Unpaid work: In 2025 more than 41% of female agricultural workers were unpaid, against 20% of men.
5. Own-account work: Nearly 63% of men were own-account workers, against 39% of women.

Why does the land record decide who counts as a farmer?

1. Ownership held by men: Women largely work family land without owning it or appearing on the land record, because patriarchal norms keep records in men’s names.
2. Share of holdings: Only 14% of operational agricultural land holdings, measured primarily through land records, are with women, as per the Agriculture Census 2015-16.
3. Land record as the source of truth: Each State uses its land revenue record for administrative purposes, so the bias against women is carried forward into databases and scheme access.
4. What exclusion costs: A woman left off the record cannot reach credit, subsidies, technology, extension services and related opportunities tied to land titles.

What does scheme access reveal about the recognition gap?

1. PM-KISAN coverage: Only 23% of beneficiaries of the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-KISAN) are women.
2. PM-KISAN design: The scheme pays Rs 6,000 a year in direct financial assistance to eligible landholding farmer families for agricultural expenses and household needs.
3. Gap where women dominate the workforce: Even in States where women are more than 50% of the agriculture workforce, women are under one-third of beneficiaries in most of them.
4. Three measures of the gap: The gap is approximated by three shares taken together, women as a share of all agriculture and allied workers in 2025, women’s operational holdings as a share of all operational holdings in 2015-16, and women as a share of eligible PM-KISAN beneficiaries in 2024.
5. Comparability caveat: The holdings and PM-KISAN figures sit nine years apart, and PM-KISAN counts individuals per landholding family, including successor widows, while the Census counts each holding once.

Why is the binding constraint the identification system rather than land itself?

1. Missing instrument: A women farmers’ registry delinked from land records had been absent before this legislation, so recognition shifts from the owner of land to the person who farms.
2. Meghalaya: Women are 70% of PM-KISAN beneficiaries there, a share that reflects matrilineal inheritance under which women are the customary landholders.
3. Kerala: Women are 44% of beneficiaries, and collective farming through groups such as Kudumbashree provides an alternative route to participation and recognition.
4. Odisha: The KALIA scheme has reached landless and sharecropper women without a land title as the gate.
5. Widest gaps: In Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh women are nearly two-thirds of the agricultural workforce but a small fraction of beneficiaries.
6. The constraint named: Where the land record is the gatekeeper women are filtered out, and where an alternative mechanism exists their access rises substantially.

What will turning recognition into access require?

1. Route to registration: Implementation runs through either self-registration or identification of women farmers by the Gram Sabha, including women with no land and women with no title in their name.
2. A new database: The Act provides for a database of women farmers, which has to be connected to existing agricultural databases.
3. Digital integration: Linking the certificates to Agri Stack, the digital agriculture platform developed by the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, and issuing FarmerIDs to women is what carries them into the wider digital agricultural ecosystem.

Challenges to the Woman Farmer Certificate

1. Duplication and exclusion in the register: A second database beside existing agricultural databases can record the same woman twice or leave her out of both. Eg. States hold no common definition for identifying a woman farmer, issuing her certificate or maintaining the record.
   The Fix: Build a standardised cross-State system of definitions, certificates and databases, so one woman farmer carries one identity across schemes and platforms.
2. Awareness as the binding step: A certificate confers status without telling its holder what the status unlocks. Eg. Registration depends on a woman either applying herself or being identified by her Gram Sabha, and a woman who knows of neither route stays uncounted.
   The Fix: Run a continuous local information campaign naming the schemes and the credit lines the certificate opens.
3. Central eligibility still keyed to land: A State certificate does not by itself alter the eligibility test a central scheme applies. Eg. PM-KISAN pays landholding farmer families, so a landless certificate holder still fails that test.
   The Fix: Rewrite scheme eligibility around the activity-based definition of a farmer rather than around a land title.

Conclusion

One State has separated the identity of a farmer from the ownership of land. Access to credit and welfare still runs through databases that read titles. The unresolved question is whether scheme administrators treat an activity-based certificate as proof of farmer status, or whether a second register simply sits beside the first without opening anything. What to watch is whether other States legislate a comparable registry, and whether the Gram Sabha route reaches women who have never appeared in any agricultural record.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2014, GS1, 10 marks] Discuss the various economic and socio-cultural forces that are driving increasing feminization of agriculture in India.”