Gender Role in agricultural processes and decision making- Empirical Evidence from India

The participation of women has been increasing in agriculture, especially as agricultural labour in the farms. Thus, it is important to understand the role that women play in the production system. As per the literature, increased cost of labour and out-migration of men to urban locations is leading to increased participation of women labour in cultivation and specially in wheat which is the man staple crop in India. But it is also envisaged that her role in decision making is still limited. This is mainly constrained by the cultural and social barriers, low bargaining power and gender gap in terms of education, and access to knowledge. Empirically there is limited information about gender disaggregated labour use information, by crop, especially for cereals like wheat, which is one the important staple crop for India and contributes to the food security. Thus, using the household survey of wheat producers conducted in three states of India- Haryana, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, the paper analyses the extent of involvement and proportionate time a woman spends at different stages of wheat production as compared to men. Further the paper analyses the role of women in decision making linked to wheat production and examines the socio-economic factors which impact her participation in the decision making. Acknowledgement : The authors duly acknowledge the support from CGIAR Research Program on Wheat (WHEAT) for funding the household level survey which is used for analysis in this paper. We are also sincerely thankful to the colleagues Christian Boeber, Meeta Punjabi Mehta, Subash S.P for their inputs on this paper and Soumik Kundu, and Birendra Pun for help in data collection.