Maharashtra’s Women Farmers Empowerment Act gives legal recognition to women farmers through a certificate independent of land ownership.
Women make up close to 60 per cent of India’s agricultural workforce, but hold fewer than 15 per cent of land titles.
The law may improve access to credit, insurance and subsidies, but it does not give women ownership, inheritance rights or control over land.
The central question is whether recognition will become a bridge to land rights, or remain a formal acknowledgement of landlessness.
When the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly unanimously passed the Women Farmers Empowerment Act on July 2, 2026, it gave legal standing to millions of women like Shakuntla Devi, who farms land in Uttarakhand’s Tehri district that sustains her family but appears nowhere in the records that determine access to credit, crop insurance and government support. The house and fields are registered solely in her husband’s name. Her case is unremarkable precisely because it is so common.
Across India, women now make up close to 60 per cent of the agricultural workforce, Union Minister of State for Agriculture Ramnath Thakur told the Lok Sabha in a written reply in July 2026, citing Periodic Labour Force Survey data. That shift has less to do with farming becoming more attractive than with an uneven economic transition: men are leaving agriculture for non-farm work faster than women, leaving women responsible for a growing share of production in a sector that carries little economic weight to begin with.
Development economists call this pattern the feminisation of agriculture: not a rise in status, but a rise in responsibility without a corresponding rise in control. Agriculture employs nearly 46 per cent of the country’s workforce but contributes barely 17 to 18 per cent of its GDP. Within that undervalued sector, the women doing an ever-larger share of the work remain, in policy terms, mostly unseen.
This is not unlike the gender-based invisibility found across India’s informal economy, but in agriculture the stakes are sharper. What scholars call agrarian patriarchy — the customary bundling of land, inheritance and household authority under male heads — means land titles, not just wages, determine who can access institutional credit, insurance and price support. Fewer than 15 per cent of those titles rest with women.
Because crop insurance and bank lending are tied to land deeds, a landless woman farmer is routinely locked out of loans, subsidised procurement and Minimum Support Price benefits, regardless of how much of the actual farming she does.
Efforts to address this disparity have surfaced periodically in Indian policy debates. The foundation was laid more than a decade ago by agriculturist M S Swaminathan, who introduced a private member’s bill, the Women Farmers’ Entitlements Bill, in the Rajya Sabha in May 2012. It lapsed the following year, but shaped later state-level experiments, including Uttarakhand’s 2021 amendment granting wives mandatory co-ownership of ancestral land, the first such law in India.
By the state government’s own estimate, the reform affected roughly 35 lakh, or 3.5 million, women. Nationally, women still hold only about 12 to 13 per cent of operational agricultural landholdings, according to the 2015-16 Agriculture Census, a gap co-ownership laws such as Uttarakhand’s have only begun to close.
Maharashtra’s law, coinciding with the United Nations’ designation of 2026 as the International Year of Women Farmers, builds on that precedent as the first dedicated statutory framework in India to recognise female agriculturists as farmers in their own right.
Its centrepiece is a ‘women farmer certificate’ that establishes farmer identity independent of land ownership, opening access to credit, insurance and subsidies without requiring a title. Gram sabhas and nagar panchayats can grant this recognition even without an individual application, and the state has appointed dedicated women farmers’ assistance officers at the block and district levels.
A 30 per cent reservation for women across state agricultural programmes is meant to push women from being dependants within male-headed households towards becoming independent economic actors. What it does not yet do is convert that recognition into bargaining power: the capacity to negotiate credit terms, inheritance claims or household decisions from a position of legal ownership rather than legal visibility.
The gap the law addresses is stark. According to the 2025 PLFS, 82 per cent of Maharashtra’s rural female workforce is engaged in agriculture, compared with 58 per cent of rural men, yet women hold only about 15.5 per cent of the state’s operational farmland.
Male outmigration reshaping who actually farms is not unique to India. Across Asia, industrialisation and labour migration have produced a common pattern: the feminisation of agriculture, playing out on different timelines from Beijing to Kathmandu to Mumbai. As Asian governments confront ageing rural populations, climate stress and food-security concerns, the question of who owns agricultural land is becoming a strategic issue rather than merely a social one.
In Nepal, more than 90 per cent of rural male migrants moved into urban or cross-border labour markets, nearly doubling the share of female-headed farming households, from 19 to 32 per cent, over the following decade. Women-led collectives, not individual landholders, have increasingly organised disaster recovery in these households, pooling resources and shared infrastructure in ways no single farmer could manage alone. Yet female-headed households did not necessarily gain corresponding ownership rights, illustrating the same gap between agricultural responsibility and legal control that Maharashtra is now attempting to address.
China’s experience offers a closer parallel. Rapid industrialisation in the 1980s and 1990s pulled men into manufacturing centres, leaving ‘left behind’ women to manage the agrarian economy largely on their own, under a Household Responsibility System that, like India’s land records today, bound contracts to male household heads.
In some respects, Beijing initially responded the way Maharashtra now has, by recognising women’s labour without altering who legally held the land. That changed with China’s Land Registration and Certification programme, launched in 2008 and rolled out nationwide from 2014, which made joint registration of women’s names on land contracts standard practice, backed by a centralised registry that India’s fragmented, state-by-state system does not currently share.
The uncomfortable question is whether Maharashtra’s certification model represents a pathway to ownership, or merely a more formal recognition of landlessness. A woman farmer recognised by certificate can access a loan, but she still cannot inherit, sell or mortgage land she may have worked her entire life. The certificate establishes who is farming the land. It says nothing about who controls it.
That distinction is not academic. A title is collateral for the larger loans a certificate alone cannot unlock. A title is what protects a woman if her husband dies, deserts her or the marriage ends, since a certificate of farmer status confers no claim on the land itself in a dispute, divorce or distress sale. A title is also what allows a woman to pass land to her daughters, rather than watching it default back through male inheritance lines the moment she is no longer the one cultivating it.
Recognition changes who the state sees. Ownership changes who decides, and who can bargain from a position of strength rather than goodwill.
There is also a question the Act does not yet answer: what happens to the certificate if a woman stops farming, remarries or leaves the household? A land title survives all of that. It is not clear yet whether a farmer certificate does. Without that clarity, the certificate risks functioning as a conditional status rather than a right, revocable in practice even where it is not revocable on paper.
If Beijing’s trajectory is a guide, recognition tends to precede title reform by years, sometimes decades, and becomes durable only once backed by registry-level enforcement rather than local discretion. India’s version of this reform is likely to be tested on exactly that gap: land records here are managed state by state, often village by village, by a revenue bureaucracy shaped by decades of path dependency, defaulting to the male name on file simply because that is what the file has always said. That is, at bottom, a question of state capacity, not just legal intent.
As India’s Union government considers national legislation on the subject, a move confirmed by S Mahendra Dev, chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, the record next door offers two lessons worth weighing. Legal identity needs a credible, time-bound path towards tenure security, not a permanent substitute for it. And mechanisation policy should be built around the women actually doing the work, not equipment scaled for a different labour force.
Maharashtra’s Woman Farmer Certificate is a genuine advance, and a reasonable template for other states. But on its own, it risks becoming what China’s early labour-recognition policies were: a durable accommodation to landlessness rather than a step towards its end.
States would need to update revenue machinery to enforce dual-name land titling as a matter of law, following Uttarakhand’s precedent, for certification to become a bridge rather than a destination. Only then can tenure security stop being the exception that state capacity occasionally permits and become the rule it is built to enforce.
Shakuntla Devi’s story is not Maharashtra’s alone. It is every state’s story until a certificate becomes a title. That, in the end, is the question Maharashtra, and every state watching it, has yet to answer: whether a woman’s name on a piece of paper is a step towards her name on the title, or a substitute for it.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth