National Women Farmers’ Day: India’s natural farming policies risk perpetuating gender bias, burdening women in agriculture

October 15 marks the National Women Farmers' Day as well as the International Day for Rural Women, presenting a timely window to look at India's natural farming policies through a feminist lens.

The launch of the National Mission on Natural Farming in 2025 as a centrally sponsored scheme marked a paradigm shift in India’s agricultural sustainability vision.

Policy focus has moved from Green Revolution-led productivity enhancement to conserving natural resources and ecosystem regeneration.

NITI Aayog’s advocacy of agroecology and natural farming underscores farmer resilience and reduced input dependency through biodiversity-based soil care and locally prepared formulations like beejamrut, jeevamrut and ganajeevamrut.

Natural farming embodies a socio-ecological system linking environmental and social feedbacks. Yet, assessing the equity of this sustainability transition from a feminist lens remains essential.

Feminist view of natural farming 

Natural farming and agroecology are positioned as powerful alternatives for addressing issues of the unequal gendered power relations in conventional agricultural systems. Its principles of reliance on local resources, intergenerational traditional knowledge, emphasis on seed and food sovereignty, recognition of women as knowledge holders, and farmer-to-farmer exchange of resources and knowledge, are all designed to overcome the systemic and structural barriers for achieving gender equity, inherent in capitalistic mode of production.

Agroecology and natural farming are popularly referred to as social movements by peasant households, with women leading from the front. Corroborative evidence are presented from across the globe reinforcing this ideological stance of agroecology and natural farming. 

However, the role of agroecology and natural farming in challenging gender stereotypes and changing gender relations in agriculture must be contextualised within the socio-economic and political spaces within which they are practiced.

In India, recent estimates of total women workers employed in agriculture stands at 64.4 per cent, and this figure for rural female workforce is 76.9 per cent. They contribute to 60-80 per cent of the nations’ food production, but own less than 14 per cent of land, with holding size smaller compared to men landowners.

The case of livestock and ownership of other productive resources in agriculture is no different. Even those who own land, do not have decision making power over the land and crop choices.

Less than 10 per cent of women engaged in farming can access credit and insurance. Women are much less likely to use purchased fertilisers, seeds, tools and technologies. They are largely excluded from extension services and are less likely to acquire new knowledge, information and skills related to agriculture and allied activities. 

Economic reproduction & sustainability in natural farming

Natural farming systems broadly based on agroecological principles comprises of a set of practices that mimic ecological cycles, augment biogeochemical cycles in soils, facilitating soil regeneration, nutrient balance and increased production. The intensity and extent of productive activities in agriculture — producing economic goods for household consumption and sales — is contingent on the health of soil, a key natural resource that determines the ability of agricultural systems to provide economic goods.

At the core of natural farming practices is soil and its ability to regenerate, replenish, maintain its health, properties, biota, processes and functions, and perpetually supply essential nutrients for growth of crops.

In classical political economy parlance, the iterative processes of replenishing, augmenting and maintaining the health of the production unit, to ensure productivity in perpetuity, are referred to as reproductive activities. In the case of soil, as already described, this would involve activities that would help replace the depreciated nutrient stock from soil, activate soil biota, improve its physical, chemical and biological properties, and restore its functions.

By extension, all natural farming practices aimed at maintaining the health of natural resource base through a cyclical and repetitive process in agriculture are economic reproductive activities, requiring substantive labour contribution.

A comparative analysis of the Andhra Pradesh Natural Farming Systems (APCNF) with low-input farming in the montane-forested tribal region, low-input rainfed farming in the semi-arid southwestern region and high-input farming in the Krishna-Godavari delta region, revealed labour intensity on APCNF farms was 21 per cent higher.

There is substantial empirical evidence to show that the unpaid labour contribution of women is central to these economic reproductive activities. Further, the recognition of women as knowledge-holders makes them integral to the farmer-to-farmer extension approach that is unique to natural farming. This, while aiming to change gender relations, can create an additional pressure on women’s time, with primary responsibility of extension falling on women farmers in natural farming systems.

The gender gap in paid and unpaid labour in agriculture is at the centre of persistent gender inequality and invisibilisation of women in agriculture. Gender relations, which extends beyond the productive sphere of agriculture to social reproductive engagements, dictates unpaid household chores like cooking, fetching water, fuel and care giving as predominantly women’s responsibility. Women in rural India, engage in labour-intensive, repetitive, heavy and exhausting tasks for around 15-16  hours each day. 

Feminist economists argue that conventional economics does not consider women’s economic contribution that are reproductive in nature. Responding to such criticism, the United Nations statistical commission revised the System of National Accounts (SNA) in 1993, and expanded and redefined SNA production boundaries to account for household production.

However, the national periodic labour surveys capture this labour contribution in agriculture majorly in the self-employed worker classification category of ‘own account worker’ and ‘helpers in household enterprises’.

Nationally, 76.9 per cent of the total rural female workers in usual status is employed in agriculture. Out of this, 80.9 per cent are ‘self-employed’, with 51 per cent among them as ‘helpers in household enterprises’. 

Gender in National Mission on Natural Farming

The National Mission on Natural Farming seems to continue the legacy of gender blindness that is the hallmark of Indian agricultural policies. Surprisingly, the operational guidelines of the National Mission on Natural Farming does not have the word ‘gender’ mentioned even once. ‘Women’ is mentioned in the document four times, thrice in the context of Krishi Sakhi’s and once in a reference to the Union Ministry of Women and Child Development. 

The national mission reinforces the gendered nature of farmer-to-farmer extension with Krishi Sakhi’s designated as ‘para-extension workers’ under the mission. The Krishi Sakhi’s will be the backbone for implementation of the natural farming mission at the Gram Panchayat level. The Operational Guideline of the Mission, lists out a host of activities for Krishi Sakhi’s which involves awareness creation, mobilising and registering willing farmers, demonstration, preparation in on-farm inputs and training of potential natural farmers, field visits to handhold farmers adopting natural farming, conducting crop cutting experiments, coordinate training of natural farmers at Krishi Vigyan Kendras, agricultural universities, among others.

The Krishi Sakhis work on an activity-linked remuneration mechanism rather than a fixed honorarium. The activity-based remuneration is also capped at a per-year and per-season basis. It remains to be seen if the role of Krishi Sakhis result in true empowerment of rural women as rightful holders of farming knowledge or ends up burdening rural women who already reel from pressures of time poverty, from the double burden of productive and social reproductive work. 

Operational guidelines of the mission also outline promotion of Bioresource Centres (BRC) and BRC entrepreneurs for supply of bio-inputs used in natural farming. The BRC guidelines specifies access to productive resources like livestock, land and shed for BRC entrepreneurs. It would be interesting to see how many women take up BRC entrepreneurship, given the inherent structural barriers to access to and ownership of productive resources by women in general in India. 

The National Mission on Natural Farming marks a paradigm shift in conceptualisation of sustainability in Indian agricultural policies. But natural farming policies that do not account for and address the hidden gender biases will end up reinforcing and perpetuating the systemic and structural barriers to gender equality in agriculture.

M Manjula, faculty, School of Development, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.