India’s agri-tech revolution is leaving women farmers behind

Savita dropped out of school after Class 8and got married in her late teens. She now lives with her husband and in-laws in a small village in Barabanki, a district near Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh.

A mother of three, 36-year-old Savita starts her day at five in the morning by cleaning the house, readying her kids for school, preparing the morning meal, and spending the rest of the day on her two-acre farm till she returns to cook lunch and dinner. Despite working on the farm daily, she still identifies as a housewife who “helps” her husband in farming.

Like Savita, many women in the village have the same routine. “We start our work on the farm by 7 am, work for 4-5 hours and then return by 11 am to cook lunch. I meet my friends for a break in the afternoon. I cook in the evening and visit the nearby ration stores as needed,” says Savita. “All of us are housewives; we usually don’t go out.”

Savita’s self-effacing outlook towards her labour is not surprising. Women’s work and efforts, especially in agriculture, go unnoticed and aren’t compensated well enough. Much of their labour remains unrecognised and unregulated due to the lack of contracts or terms of employment, and practically no land ownership. Their contribution to agriculture is assumed to be an extension of their role as family women.

Some women do take up farming to supplement their families’ income. But who owns and cultivates land is largely mediated by caste, with women from marginalised castes more likely to be working as farm labourers. This mindset is exemplified by Mahavir Singh, an upper-caste farmer, who sympathises with the women labourers working on his field but believes that women from his household should not engage in farm work. “Why should our women work? We do not allow our daughters and sisters to work in fields. What is the need? We can always hire labourers. A woman must look after her family.”

Another woman from Barabanki, Pratima Devi, describes her day on the farm as “only” engaging in specific work such as weeding and sowing, while her husband takes on the majority of the tasks, decides the quantity and quality of farm produce, and participates in group meetings with other farmers to discuss and share information. “My husband does all the duties that require a visit to the market because the markets are far and it is unsuitable for women to go there. The shopkeepers are mostly all men and our men folk don’t like us interacting with them,” she says.

Despite working in the field for the same hours as her husband, Pratima Devi is unaware of details about her farm beyond the crops they grow every season, the methods to do specific manual labour, and the information her husband decides to share with her. Women’s contributions to more straightforward, manual tasks result in less decision-making about family finances or choices around types of fertilisers and crops, and discourage their knowledge-seeking behaviours over time. This is concerning, given that about 80% of India’s actively working women are in the agriculture sector as self-employed farmers or labourers, and only 13% of rural women own the land they work on, according to an Oxfam study from 2018.

“Nobody has ever cared to educate us. That is not a priority for anyone,” says Savita.

Rural women are missing from the Internet

Digital connectivity in rural areas paves the way for tech start-ups to penetrate local networks and design digital systems that increase yield efficiency in terms of time, cost, and profitability for farmers across the agriculture value chain. Up-and-coming agri-tech start-ups have been aiming to achieve this through farm advisories, insurance bundles, and farm products.

Being technologically empowered means having access to these digital tools and the ability to use them for services beyond making or receiving phone calls for more relevant services. It can unlock massive potential for women in agriculture, who continue to be excluded from accessing information, good quality farm products, equal wages, and stable earning opportunities.

This exclusion often stems from the need for more literacy, low access to digital devices, and inadequate spaces for women to address their concerns. In many cases, it also results from an unwillingness to engage with technology. “Why should I use a phone when my husband and sons are there? I only use it to dial and speak to my mother. For everything else, the young ones are there,” says Ramwati from Hardoi, a district in Uttar Pradesh.

Indian women are 14% less likely than men to own a mobile phone and 41% less likely to use mobile internet services, according to a 2022 report by the GSMA. The gender gap is wider in rural India, where 24% women had access to mobile internet, compared with 45% among urban women, as of 2021. Research also shows that the rapid shift to digital modes of communication during the pandemic exacerbated the divide in digital connectivity, infrastructure, and services.

Neutral is not enough

Agri-services are designed to be gender-neutral, but technology experts have pointed towards increasing systemised exclusion of women farmers from the agri-tech revolution. For instance, our analysis of field data revealed that less than 20% of women farmers were utilising advisory and insurance services offered by the agri-tech start-up DeHaat, even while the services were accessible to both male and female farmers.

This highlights that gender-neutral might not be enough, and agri-tech firms would benefit by fostering women-focused interventions instead. This can not only help bridge the gender divide but also allow firms to tap into a profitable avenue for increased service uptake. Extension officers from DeHaat, who work with farmers in fields, say only men participate in meetings and conversations they conduct.

Women smallholder farmers underline the need for centres that cultivate learning and promote the adoption of innovations, and say they were more likely to respond to women-oriented marketing for services. These strategies can complement current efforts to promote agri-tech services in rural communities. Our insights and prototyping activities helped us understand what these women-focused interventions could look like and tackle women’s diminishing motivation and curiosity to explore new things:

Promote knowledge hubs: Savita, the farmer from Barabanki, says, “We’d like a one-stop meeting for everything: farming, household matters, savings, and financial literacy. And we’d like to learn how to use a phone, too.” Other women farmers also express a yearning for information that extends beyond agriculture to vital aspects like health, budgeting, nutrition, and childcare. Their collective aspiration is for actionable, locally pertinent information to empower them during times of necessity, facilitating informed decision-making. This can be done through planned outreach to Self-Help Groups (SHGs) and other active women’s groups. Beyond self-empowerment, their goal is also to exert some influence within their households. Involving men and helping them understand the importance of educating their female family members is critical to making this happen.

Create women-specific channels and marketing: While women are keen to learn how to use tech services and are open to training, they add that they feel safest and most comfortable with women-only helplines or while talking to people they know and trust.Many women farmers are also cautious about terms like “insurance” and “advisory” due to past bad experiences of insurance fraud and faulty advice. Creating women-specific channels and targeted marketing is crucial to address these concerns and build trust. Female ambassadors, extension officers, or tailored collateral such as women-oriented posters and video ads, help legitimise services and encourage women’s uptake.

Identify influences in the local community: There is also the need to organise more in-person meetings for women. Women prefer that agri-tech service providers make efforts to identify women influencers and local female agri-experts who could lead, impart knowledge, and facilitate safe spaces for them to learn more and foster their growth as farmers. In this way, agri-tech companies could expand their services to all the village women farmers. As one of the women from Barabanki, during an informal meeting, put it: “This is a village. If you are speaking to one woman, assume that you are already speaking to four.”

Women farmers exhibit remarkable empathy and camaraderie, readily extending a helping hand to their counterparts. Ramwati Devi’s initiative to teach village women to cook noodles after learning from YouTube, Savita’s unwavering participation in SHG sessions, and Chitra’s proactive assistance in getting her neighbours’ Aadhaar cards exemplify their strong community bonds and nurturing spirits, which revolve around family and community welfare. There is value in building on these networks to deliver gender-transformative services and bolster business within communities. With accessible and inclusive agri-services, these efforts will encourage a new generation of Indian women farmers to learn, innovate, and make decisions.

*All names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.
(Prerak Mehta is Partner and Dhyani Parekh is Designer at Dalberg Design, where they worked on a project with Mercy Corps and DeHaat on the ‘Nari Shakti’ program that addresses the limited access of women farmers to agri-tech services.

Views are the authors’ own and not necessarily those of financialexpress.com.)