One of the major problems that women farmers were facing today was access to pattas or title to land, farm scientist and Rajya Sabha MP M.S. Swaminathan has said.
He said this at an event here on Tuesday to felicitate women farmers.
Around 32 women farmers from Odisha, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand were felicitated by three organisations — Oxfam India, WomenPowerConnect and Landesa (RDI).
The agriculture sector employs 80 per cent of all economically active women, most of who are neither legally nor socially recognised as farmers, they said in a release.
About land titles, Swaminathan, who was the Guest of Honour at the event, said: “I had mentioned this to Pranab Mukherjee when he was Finance Minister. The action has been taken to issue patta or entitlement on the name of women farmers and I hope by the 12th Plan, this will be implemented throughout the country.”
Commending the felicitation of this “unrecognised” workforce, he said: “Women are the ones who have brought transition from food gatherers to farming in history. It is women who introduced rice into cultivation and have made tremendous intellectual contribution historically to farming.”
He also referred to the women farmers from the “Paraja” tribe in Jaipur and Odisha, whose work had been nationally and internationally recognised for growing and maintaining 3.000 varieties of rice.
Anne F. Stenhammer, Regional Programme Director, UN Women, South Asia Regional Office, said women farmers were “the ones who grow the food we eat, who bare the brunt of the weather, they bear so much and work so much, yet they remain invisible’’.
The event also saw the release of two documents by Swaminathan, a book titled, ‘Women, Land and Power in Asia’ by Govind Kelkar and ‘Case Studies of Women Farmers’, a dossier of the lives of 13 women farmers.