Discuss the various economic and socio-cultural forces that are driving increasing feminization of agriculture in India.

As men move out of farming, women perform a rising share of agricultural work as cultivators, labourers and unpaid family workers. Around three-fourths of rural working women are engaged in agriculture, yet only about 14 per cent of operational holdings are in women's names (Agriculture Census 2015-16).

Economic forces

• Male outmigration to construction and urban informal jobs leaves women as de facto farm managers.
• Agrarian distress: shrinking, fragmented holdings and unremunerative cultivation push men to diversify into non-farm incomes while women remain on the farm as residual labour.
• Wage differentials: women accept lower agricultural wages, making them the preferred hired workforce for many operations.

Socio-cultural forces

• Gendered task allocation assigns transplanting, weeding, harvesting, post-harvest processing and livestock care largely to women.
• Norms restricting women's independent migration and non-farm mobility confine them to the village economy even as men leave.
• Women's farm labour is treated as an extension of domestic duty — hence often unpaid, unrecorded and invisible in data.

The Economic Survey 2017-18 formally flagged this feminization. For it to mean empowerment rather than feminized drudgery, women need recorded land titles, access to institutional credit, extension services and drudgery-reducing machinery — the logic behind the Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana. Recognising women as farmers, not helpers, is the first step.