A Note on our Curatorial Intent

The etymological roots of the word ‘farm’ can be traced to the Middle English ‘ferme’, referring to the sum a tenant paid to cultivate a leased parcel of land. ‘Ferme’ was borrowed from the Anglo-Norman verb ‘fermer’, meaning ‘to rent’, and derives from the medieval Latin ‘firma’, or fixed payment. The word’s agricultural associations are relatively modern, having evolved gradually from the fact that such lease agreements were often made for agricultural purposes. A medieval farmer, then, was someone who essentially leased land and collected a fee for it. It is striking that the earliest uses of ‘farm’ and ‘farmer’ are legal and economic in character, rooted in contractual obligation rather than labour or crop. In these two originary senses of the word, the woman farmer occupies a peculiar contradiction: the labour she performs to sustain food systems is most closely tied to that of a ‘farmer’, yet she is less of one in the legal and economic structures through which the status is conferred. Landlessness and unrecognised labour place her outside the very terms by which the farmer has historically been defined, even as food production depends on her.

According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2025, 59.8 percent of employed women nationally were engaged in agriculture, with the figure rising to 72.7 percent among rural women. Yet the Agriculture Census 2015–16 recorded women as operating only 11.72 percent of the country’s total operated agricultural area. Operational holdings do not necessarily establish legal ownership; they indicate that land is formally operated by a person, regardless of whether they hold the title to it. Read together, these figures reveal a stark disparity between women’s participation in agricultural work and their recognition as farm operators. They are underpaid, if they are paid at all, and often shut out of credit schemes, crop insurance, compensation, and agricultural extension services that default to male landholders. 

These exclusions extend beyond land ownership: Access to markets, training, equipment, infrastructure, and institutional support is uneven, while the division of labour frequently confines women to the least remunerative stages of production and processing. Their work also extends beyond fields and workplaces and into the domestic sphere, where cooking, cleaning, childcare, and the care of the family remain largely their responsibility. The working day of a woman farmer is rarely confined to the work through which she earns an income, but encompasses the labour required to sustain both her household and the food systems on which others depend.

This already unequal distribution of labour and resources is further compounded by the accelerating climate crisis. Heat exhaustion along coastlines, in salt pans and paddy fields, time spent procuring water and performing domestic work, and crop losses that disproportionately affect those without land titles or access to compensation, all shape women’s working lives. Climate stress intensifies the social, economic, and institutional conditions that determine who can absorb a shock, adapt to it, or recover from it. The strategies women adopt in response are equally shaped by the resources available to them, their access to collective support, and the specific ecologies in which they live and work.

The intent behind this resource library’s curation is twofold. First, it aims to make structural issues less abstract. The resources here seek to bring greater granularity to women farmers’ lived experiences through ground reports, case studies, first-person accounts, photo essays, and documentaries. How are a woman farmer’s immediate concerns shaped by her geographical location, access to land and resources, or position within the household? How do these conditions shape the strategies she adopts to sustain her livelihood, secure food, and respond to environmental change? By attending to these questions at the scale of everyday life, the library seeks to make visible not only the structures that constrain women’s labour, but also the knowledge, negotiations, and adaptations through which they navigate them.

The resources also follow women across various sectors and stages of India’s food systems. It includes cultivators and seed conservers, horticulturalists and forest foragers, fishers and fish processors, dairy workers, livestock rearers, food processors, and vendors and traders. It attends both to the labour of production, and to the often-overlooked work of gathering, preserving, transporting, processing, and selling food. It also documents the work that sustains these activities through a worsening climate crisis: maintaining seed banks, building kitchen gardens, organising collectives, negotiating access to land and water, and transmitting agricultural and culinary knowledge across generations. 

Second, the resource library seeks to expand what the word ‘farmer’ is asked to hold. The women sustaining our food systems do not fit neatly within a definition that privileges land ownership or the formal operation of a farm. They move across the entire arc of the food system, from sowing and harvesting to processing, preservation, transport and sale. Many undertake several of these activities simultaneously, alongside domestic and care work. To recognise them as farmers is not simply to broaden a label or offer symbolic recognition. It is to make their labour legible to institutions, policies, and systems of support that determine whose work is counted, whose knowledge is valued, and who can claim access to land, credit, insurance, and training. A more expansive definition also makes it possible to account for the interdependence of agricultural and allied labour, and to recognise the women whose work sustains food production without conferring on them the status or security associated with being a fisher or a farmer. 

This definitional correction is a starting point for more meaningful research, advocacy, and policymaking: one that begins with the labour actually performed, rather than the legal or institutional categories through which it has historically been recognised.

Expanding the category, however, must not mean treating women farmers as a homogeneous group. Their experiences are differentiated by caste, indigeneity, class, geography, and access to resources, among other factors. Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi women face forms of dispossession and exclusion shaped not only by gender, but also by caste hierarchies, land relations, customary rights, and the histories of their communities. These factors often decide how labour is organised, how climate stress is experienced, and which forms of adaptation remain possible. Questions of land, livelihood, and recognition are also inseparable from migration. Climate distress can precipitate displacement through sudden disasters, but it can also make migration a response to the slow erosion of natural resources, declining agricultural returns, and shrinking employment opportunities. When men migrate in search of work to other sectors, women may be left to manage farms and households without corresponding access to land, income, resources or institutional recognition. Migration, however, is not gender-exclusive, nor is it always a response to climate stress alone. Women farmers migrate too, whether seasonally or permanently, and enter labour landscapes in which their position as migrants intersects with gender, caste, and the conditions of agricultural work. Their experiences complicate any assumption that women remain rooted in rural livelihoods while men move elsewhere. Following these movements is essential to understanding how agricultural labour is reorganised, how households negotiate risk, and how women’s work changes across places and sectors.

Taken together, these resources offer a way of looking at the woman farmer not as a singular figure, but through the many forms of labour, knowledge, and negotiation that sustain India’s food systems. 

The resource library also attempts to recognise institutions, non-profit organisations, social enterprises, and action groups that have already been carrying out both of the intended functions stated above. 

Finally, this resource library is not exhaustive, nor does it claim to provide a complete picture of women’s work in agriculture and allied sectors. It is an evolving collection, encountered through research, which we hope prompts further questions, reveals gaps in what has been documented, and encourages the discovery of work that deserves to be included.