ABSTRACT
In spite of producing 80% of the nation’s food and representing three-quarters of the nation’s total farming community, women farmers are the most marginalised and invisible section of workforce in India. Historically, they have endured systematic and structural discrimination in ownership of landholdings, access to market resources, access to credit, absence of politico-legal support or even constraints on physical mobility. The introduction of new farm laws in India from October 2020, with implications on deregulation of agricultural market, minimum sale price and corporatisation of agriculture, will further aggravate ‘feminisation of agrarian distress’. This chapter argues that with more men shifting to non-agricultural employment, there is a dire need to establish a model enabling visibility and sustainability of women farmers that could, in turn, be aiding sustainability of agriculture in India. Based on the secondary sources, there is an attempt to examine the extent of visibility achieved through the recent protests by women farmers against the new farm laws in India. It also infers that the Feminist Agri-food Systems Theory (FAST) framework that values women’s indigenous knowledge and local networks, established by Pennsylvania Women’s Agricultural Network, could be implemented on an experimental basis to strengthen sustainability in Agriculture.
