Salt ‘Farming’: Gendered Labour and Ecologies of migrant workers in Little Rann of Kutch

Each October, around 60,000 members of the Agariya community leave their homes in the towns surrounding the Little Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, and migrate to the desert for eight months to harvest salt. Up to 76 percent of India’s salt is produced here. Salt farmers earn an average of 150 rupees per tonne while the market price for salt is 17,000 rupees. The resultant dispossession and precarity is compounded for the tribe’s women. Agariya women contribute an average of eight hours of labour per day across the full production cycle (forming the bunds, preparing the pans, treading the hardened bases through the ancient practice of paglee (a month or more of being walked on with bare feet), monitoring engines that run for 12-24 hours daily, and harvesting and lifting salt) while being classified as ‘housewives’ and denied formal economic recognition. Literacy rates among women salt workers in Gujarat is half of that of the men. Additionally, Agariya women are often burdened with debts passed down when their spouses die from the physical stress and disease caused by salt collection. The paper situates this within a longer history of colonial and postcolonial dispossession. The salt monopoly by the British, the Criminal Tribes Act, and eviction threats following the establishment of the Wild Ass Sanctuary in 1973 without community consultation stripped the Agariyas of their land rights. While the Gujarat government partially reversed the eviction threat in 2023, formal land rights remain elusive. This paper elucidates the complex social process of salt making, which unfolds against a backdrop of the asymmetrical power dynamics of gender and capitalism, ecological restraints, and colonial history. Agariya women are at its centre, indispensable and invisible in equal measure.