Read this essay to learn about the rural women in India. After reading this essay you will learn about:- 1. Introduction to the Rural Women in India 2. Role of Women in Agriculture 3. Developing Technologies for Farm Women 4. National Research Centre for Women in Agriculture 5. Empowerment of Women 6. Strategies for Empowerment of Rural Women and Other Details.
Essay Contents:
- Essay on the Introduction to Rural Women in India
- Essay on the Role of Women in Agriculture
- Essay on the Developing Technologies for Farm Women
- Essay on the National Research Centre for Women in Agriculture
- Essay on the Empowerment of Women
- Essay on the Strategies for Empowerment of Rural Women
- Essay on the Role of Panchayats in Developing Rural Women
- Essay on the Empowering Rural Women
1. Essay on the
Introduction to Rural Women in India:
The majority of the rural women in India, as well as in other developing countries, actively participate in farm-related operations, besides fulfilling their responsibilities as homemakers. The extent of their participation, however, varies depending on the socioeconomic and cultural background of the area. Pearson (1979) classified the role of farm women into the following four categories.
These are:
(i) Independent producers, who manage the farms largely by themselves;
(ii) Agricultural partners, who share most aspects of work, responsibilities and decision-making with their husbands;
(iii) Agricultural helpers, who only participate in farm work at busy times when extra help is needed; and
(iv) Farm homemakers, who contribute to the farm production indirectly by preparing meals and attending those working in the fields.
The Home Science Colleges in most State Agricultural Universities and elsewhere in the country have been offering specialization in the disciplines of:
(i) Food and nutrition,
(ii) Home management,
(iii) Child development,
(iv) Clothing and textile, and
(v) Home science education and extension.
As a result, the focus has been mainly on home management, child care, nutrition, hygiene, and to a limited extent on income generating activities.
2. Essay on the Role of Women in Agriculture:
Women in agricultural families perform many farm-related activities, both within and outside the household, in most parts of the country. They constitute a large part of the total work force in agriculture. Although the pattern of division of labour between men and women varies greatly from region to region, women are involved in most of the operations in agriculture, including subsidiary enterprises like diary, poultry, beekeeping, mushroom cultivation, sericulture, fish culture, social forestry, etc.
So far as crop husbandry is concerned, women participate in almost all activities, right from preparatory tillage to harvest, and even in post-harvest tasks like processing, storage and marketing. There is a general taboo on women engaging in ploughing, but in exceptional circumstances even ploughing is done by them.
Traditionally, seed cleaning, seed grading, sowing, dibbling, planting, transplanting, weeding, thinning, gap filling, inter-culturing, harvesting, threshing, shelling, hulling, winnowing, feeding cattle, and looking after milch animals and poultry birds are the main jobs for women.
Activities such as processing and storage at home are performed exclusively by women. It may, however, be mentioned that regardless of the economic status, higher caste women usually avoid doing field work. Their activities are confined within and at best around the homestead. By and large, the main role of women in high income group is supervisory.
3. Essay on the Developing Technologies for Farm Women:
In order to develop women-oriented technologies, the women specific jobs and their perspectives have to be identified.
Following Samanta (1995), the principles for developing technologies for farm women, are:
(i) Improving farm women’s productivity/work efficiency.
(ii) Increasing their income generating capabilities.
(iii) Increasing their employment opportunities.
(iv) Reducing the drudgery and health hazards in working for farm and home.
There is need to incorporate knowledge and skill of women into the development of modern farm technologies by the scientists. The blending of indigenous wisdom of farm women with the modern technologies is also important.
Their participation in all fronts of technology development and generation process is of utmost importance. Because of their involvement in the farming as well as in the household activities, the farm women often are hard pressed for time.
While developing the technology, this point must be kept in mind by the scientists, so that a particular operation takes less time which is performed by the women, giving them ample time for other work and rest. A ‘woman’s angle’ should be built into all technologies, which are relevant to women.
4.Essay on the National Research Centre for Women in Agriculture:
With the visibility of farm women as farmers, a need was felt, with consideration of sustainability and equity, for developing agricultural research and development programmes which shall reflect the role of women as farmers.
With this background, the Indian Council of Agricultural Research established a National Research Centre for Women in Agriculture (NRCWA) at Bhubaneswar in April, 1996. The Centre has been visualized to be upgraded as an Institute in future, to spread its programmes in all regions of the country.
Gender Analysis:
The term gender describes the socially determined attributes of men and women, including male and female roles. On the other hand, sex-denotes the physical and biological differences between males and females. Gender has proven to be an essential variable for analyzing the roles, responsibilities, opportunities, constraints, incentives, costs and benefits, and also women’s access to research and extension services. Gender analysis helps us to understand the gender related issues, their diversity, intensity and interrelatedness.
Building Extension Contact with Farm Women:
The difficulty in building extension contact with farm women lies in the fact that an extension agency generally does not have a sound understanding of farm women as their clients. It also lacks a working knowledge of their perceptions and predispositions, needs and interests, or their strengths and weaknesses.
Reaching Farm Women:
Reaching farm women, according to Dwarakinath (1999), is a difficult task for the male extension agency, particularly in a traditional setting. But, once farm women recognize that external contacts are not violate of the basic norms and customs, and such contacts are indeed consistent with their own interests, they become less shy and withdrawing. However, the extension service must always be on its guard in starting and maintaining the contacts with farm women.
The steps suggested for building extension contact with farm women are as follows:
Initiating Contacts:
It is often helpful if the extension agency begins farm women extension work with the support of village leaders. Wherever necessary, the first few meetings may be held with village leaders participating. This will provide the required legitimacy to the programmes.
Working Through Elderly Women:
Among the farm women, the elderly female members have lesser inhibitions in interacting with the male staff, and are frequently quite frank in their expressions. Since they enjoy the respect of younger women, they may function as opinion makers in the group.
Identifying Contact Groups:
There is increasing evidence to the effect that extension contacts are more effective with women groups compared to individual contacts. Farm women have been found to be more comfortable in groups, more free to seek and share information, and to derive greater satisfaction from the experience. Therefore, in consultation with farm women, extension staff should identify existing friendship groups or promote interest groups to develop a working relationship.
Developing Mutual Trust:
Nothing is more important in extension work than building the initial rapport with the clientele. This is specially important in working with farm women. Having elderly women in the lead, extension staff should establish the regularity of contacts at acceptable periodic intervals. It is also necessary to ensure transparency in the interactions by conducting the meetings at acceptable common places and for predetermined and widely known purposes.
Need-Based and Skill-Based Extension:
Extension staff will achieve greater acceptability by starting with the felt needs. Simple technologies will go a long way. This will prepare the clients to consider more complex technologies gradually. Women generally take pride in the new skills they learn and become more willing to share their experience with fellow women. Also, it is important to ensure that different improvements introduced do not add to the drudgery of farm women who are already overworked.
Link Workers are Helpful:
In situations where local women are of ‘withdrawing’ kind and where the extension service does not have female staff to help initiating extension work, link workers will be specially useful. In other situations they can work as multipliers.
These are local women with leadership qualities, and are often more literate and progressive persons, who function as para-extension workers. They may be paid or honorary functionaries. If properly chosen, trained and utilized, they can impart enormous multiplier effect to the extension work.
Paraprofessional Aides:
An aide is a less than fully professional change agent who intensively contacts clients to influence their innovation-decisions. One of the important advantages of aides is their much lower cost per client contacted. But the main advantage of paraprofessional aides over professional change agents is that the aides are socially closer to the lower-status members of the user system that they serve.
Technical expertise may not be the most important quality of a change agent in the eyes of clients. Personal acceptability of the change agent is an important, or more important, than technical expertise. Paraprofessional aides are much less technically expert than are professionals, but they often more than make up for their lower degree of technical expertise through their greater social expertness.
For example, family planning aides in most developing nations are female paraprofessionals, who are better able to discuss the culturally sensitive topic of contraception with female clients than are predominately male doctors.
Female Disadvantage:
The World Bank (1996) identified several female disadvantages in India. An understanding of the disadvantages is essential for research and extension concerning rural women. The position of women in traditional Indian society can be measured by their autonomy in decision making and by the degree of access they have to the outside world.
By these measures, Indian women, particularly those in the North, fare poorly. Women are dominated not only by the men they have married but also by their new in-laws, especially the older females. Women are frequently prevented from working outside the home and travelling without an escort, and this has profound implications for their access to information and assistance.
The money they earn, the dwellings in which they live, and even their reproductive careers are not theirs to control. In addition, the work they perform is socially devalued. This inherently inequitable social system is perpetuated through a process of socialization that rationalizes and internalizes the female disadvantage.
The consequences of women’s unfavourable status in India include discrimination in the allocation of household resources, such as food, and in access to health care and education, as well as marriage at young ages.
Daughters are generally considered a net liability they often require a dowry, they leave their original homes after marriage, and their labour is devalued. The result is a strong preference for sons which is readily apparent in the relative neglect of female children, who are weaned earlier than males, receive smaller quantities of less nutritious food and less medical care, and are more likely to be removed from school. This inequitable treatment continues into women’s adult lives.
Beginning in childhood, most rural women fulfill multiple productive functions in addition to bearing children and performing household labour. The recent agricultural innovations have little advantage for the rural women, who still perform primarily manual labour.
The Social Context of Human Fertility:
The potential physiological capacity of a female to give birth to children is termed as fecundity. The number of children actually born indicates fertility. Thus, a woman may be capable during her life span of producing about twenty children (her fecundity), whereas she may actually give birth to no more than five (her fertility).
Society controls the fertility of its female members through various ways. It may discourage, for instance, the bearing of a large number of children through deliberate effort to prevent conception, or through the social sanction of abortion. The age of marriage may be delayed in some societies, and other cultures may have various taboos on sexual behaviour.
Some cultures may encourage large families and set high value on birth of sons. Fertility may, therefore, be considered a function of the biological, social and cultural forces that serve to encourage or discourage child bearing.
Nutrition Education:
The problem of malnutrition and under-nutrition is widely prevalent in India, especially amongst the vulnerable groups of population (i.e. infants and pre-school children, pregnant and lactating women, aged and sick ones).
Poverty, low purchasing power, lack of nutrition knowledge, wrong cooking practices and prevalence of social taboos are important factors contributing to the malnutrition. Even the available foods are not utilized properly due to the wrong cooking practices followed by women.
Kaur and Sehgal (1995) conducted an experimental research study with poor and mostly illiterate rural women of Hisar district in Haryana. Extension methods like lectures, demonstrations, posters, leaflets and their combinations were used. It was concluded from the study that inadequate knowledge about cooking practices was possessed by most of the respondents.
Wrong cooking practices were followed by majority of the women. Nutrition education brought a significant gain in knowledge and improvement in practices. As women play a crucial role in the selection, preparation and serving of food; educating them will help in improving the nutritional status of masses, specially the vulnerable groups. This will also help in increasing the awareness of women which will go a long way in improving the overall nutritional status of the community.
5. Essay on the Empowerment of Women:
According to Devadas (1999), women’s participation in income generating activities is believed to increase their status and decision making power. With employment, women do not remain as ‘objects’ of social change, but become ‘agents’ of it.
The problem of poverty cannot be tackled without providing opportunities of productive employment to women. Even where there is a male earner, women’s earnings form a major part of the income of poor households. Moreover, women contribute a large share of what they earn to basic family maintenance than men ; increases in women’s income translates more directly into better child health, nutrition and family well-being.
Women’s participation in the labour force also brings about changes in awareness and attitudes which may have long-term benefits such as access to health and education programmes, reduction in birth rates, thrift and savings etc. Economic independence of women will create far-reaching social changes and prove necessary for them to face injustice and discrimination.
Studies by International Labour Organization (ILO) point out that wage employment actually improves women’s bargaining power within the family in determining inter- household resource allocation, in contrast to that by the women in cultivator households whose unpaid family labour is seldom recognized on monetary grounds.
Specific efforts have to be made not only to increase employment opportunities for women labourers, but also to reach housewives and unpaid female family workers with training, credit and other information, and support services for productive self-employment. Unless, such access is created and improved for these ‘women inside’, the process of development will fail to achieve maximum productivity.
One of the prerequisites to promote- empowerment of women is promotion of organizations among women. Women can be organized through a variety of means namely through formation of cooperatives, Mahila Mandals, self-help groups and the like.
6. Essay on the Strategies for Empowerment of Rural Women:
Veerabhadraiah and Fami (1999) suggested several strategies for empowerment of rural women. These were placed under three categories.
Short-Term Strategies:
Emphasis in this phase is to fulfill the basic needs of rural women through welfare programmes like:
i. Literacy programme.
ii. Family planning programme and health education.
iii. Nutrition programme for mothers and children.
iv. Potable water and appropriate fuel for cooking and heating the house.
v. Access to household technology.
vi. Home economic programme.
Mid-Term Strategies:
Emphasis is on facilitating the involvement of rural women in economic activities and strengthening their economic base for entering in social and political mainstream of society.
Some Strategies Are:
i. Access to appropriate technology and financial resources.
ii. Ownership of productive assets.
iii. Attaining income security through income generating projects.
iv. Access to communication media to improve their communication and mediation skills.
v. Access to non-formal education like extension and vocational education in order to improve their entrepreneurial skills.
Long-Term Strategies:
Social and political mainstream are important components of empowerment of rural women at high level.
Some strategies which can be applied at this phase are:
i. Enhancing organizational and social leadership skills in community action.
ii. Increasing their access to political power, policy formulation and strategic gender training programme.
iii. Establishing organizations or self-help groups for their own networking and empowerment through group-building.
iv. Providing distance education and correspondence courses.
v. Encouraging socio-cultural changes by exploring gender issues.
7. Essay on the Role of Panchayats in Developing Rural Women:
The Constitution 73rd Amendment Act of 1992 provides that not less than one-third of the total number of seats in all the three tiers of Panchayat in the country shall be reserved for women. Further, not less than one-third of the total number of offices of Chairpersons in the Panchayats at each level shall be reserved for women.
A major impediment in implementation of programmes for rural women in India has been the near absence of female extension workers. The large number of women Panchayat Members and Chairpersons could play an important role as extension agent associates, in the planning and implementation of programmes for rural women at the grass roots level throughout the country.
For this purpose, the extension agencies should train up women Members and Chairpersons of the Panchayats in identifying location specific technologies for rural women and in methods of communicating, motivating and organizing them.
8. Essay on the Self Help Group:
Self Help Group (SHG) is a small, economically homogeneous affinity group of rural poor, voluntarily formed to save and mutually agree to contribute to a common fund to be lent to its members as per group decision for socioeconomic development.
Self-help groups:
1. Provide access to their members from mainstream financing agencies like banks,
2. Inculcate a culture of saving among members of the group,
3. Reduce the dependence on money lenders and make available timely credit at much lower rates to the individual members,
4. Enthuse its members in the art of collective management, and
5. Acquire visibility and voice in the household and in the community for its members.
The stages in the formation of self-help groups are: pre-formation, formation, stabilization, and growth and expansion.
The inherent strength of the rural poor, particularly the rural women, when organized into self-help groups, is gradually being recognized by the government, local self-governments, banks, NGOs etc. who encourage their formation for development through group action
A good and viable SHG should possess the following characteristics: comprises 12-20 members; all members belonging to the same socio-economic strata of society, specifically poor; consists of either only men or of only women, having strong bond of affinity; rotational leadership; members attend meetings, save and participate in all activities voluntarily; non-partisan in nature; maintain and update group-accounts regularly. To become sustainable, SHGs should have backward linkages with technology and credit, and forward linkages with processing and marketing organizations.
9. Essay on Empowering Rural Women:
A case study by Roy (1998) on women of the Sundarbans, West Bengal, has shown how determination and collective effort can pave the way to empowering rural women. Kamala Raptan, a woman Panchayat worker of the Lahiripur Gram Panchayat showcases the success of woman power in rural development.
For once, endless discussions have given way to work. Kamala’s choice to be a panchayat functionary was a sound one. She knew it was the right forum to plan programmes for women and address their needs and have them believe in taking a hold on their lives. Her decision changed lives.
Earlier, women in the Sundarbans had to depend entirely on the earnings of their men, most of whom were engaged either in fishing or collecting honey from the wild The Panchayat Samitis in the beginning of the 1980s introduced certain schemes like DWCRA, TRYSEM and ICDS in Gosaba, Basanti, Sandeshkhali and Canning.
Anubhav, a voluntary health association, conducted a comprehensive survey of the economic and social status of people in the Sundarbans. They were surprised by the headway the entrepreneurial programmes had made among the neo-literate and illiterate women.
Under the auspices of the Tagore Society for Rural Development (a voluntary organization working in a number of locations), the women’s cooperative of Gosaba started weaving and tailoring in a modest way with just ten women. They stitched clothes, made chatais (mats) and experimented with kitchen gardening and poultry. Today the Samiti has more than 500 members engaged in weaving. They produce saris, gamchas(napkins), bed sheets, bags and ready-made garments.
The change is also apparent in the growing social awareness about women’s rights. Quite a few organizations have come forward to teach women to fight their own battles by taking up issues like wife-beating, dowry, desertion, bigamy-and seeking redress.
Women from all over Sundarbans are brought together to attend conferences, discuss various social problems and initiate future action plans. Twenty years after its inception, the Samiti can well take credit for not only having raised an awareness among women but also for having provided them with the wherewithal to become self-sufficient.
The late Bina Kanjilal, a noted social worker, initiated the concept of group savings. This was so popular in Rangabelia that it worked wonders in 1988, when a terrible cyclone reduced all efforts to nothingness and left people with the massive task of rebuilding their lives from scratch.
The Sundarbans has long been a land of tiger widows. Bee- collectors have often fallen prey to tigers and their death has left their families steeped in poverty. Some women’s organizations have tried bettering their lot. The Sundarbans Khadi and Village Industrial Society deserves mention.
In the early nineteen eighties, the women of the Sundarbans knew nothing about fixing targets and setting goals in self-sustenance. From 1984, skill development programmes were introduced for women below the poverty line. The schemes also looked at the ecology and the health status of the people of the region.
Accordingly, they encouraged the cultivation of mulberry trees. The sale of mulberry leaves ensured additional income. The beginning of sericulture generated further employment. Bee- keeping alongside ensured increased crops and honey brought in more money. Soon some villagers started processing cereals and pulses and kept exploitative mill-owners at bay.
Women in Hingalganj and Sandeshkhali have shown how illiteracy can be conquered and that too from the backwaters. Quite a few in Dhamakhali village have turned entrepreneurs and do business with paddy, jute mats, vegetables and ICDS-supplies’.
Five housewives run small shops, selling rakhis and sundry household items. Yet the going is not as easy as it seems. Often husbands don’t agree to wives becoming self-sufficient. But this time, the women are not giving up. And no one can tread on their dreams.