‘Maatir taan’, a phrase in Bengali, means the pull of the soil. Poets have used it. Nationalists, in their more romantic moods, have draped it around the figure of Bharat Mata herself. What, however, they have not been able to do is to figure out a way of extending that pull, that sense of ownership, that feeling of belonging, to the women who till the soil.
New Delhi recently hosted the Global Conference on Women in Agri-Food Systems to mark the United Nations’ declaration of 2026 as the International Year of the Woman Farmer. India decided to celebrate the moment with speeches even though it is yet to deliver a land title in a woman’s name.
According to the latest census-based estimates, about 33% of India’s cultivators and 42% of its agricultural labourers are women. In rural states like Odisha, women do the majority of transplantation, weeding, harvesting, and post-harvest processing, sometimes making up over 60% of farm labour. However, as the World Bank has recorded, women only have about 11% of agricultural landholdings. The National Family Health Survey indicates that women hold 13.9% of operational landholdings as per the Agriculture Census 2015-16. Often, land is registered in the names of fathers, husbands, and sons, men who may not have touched the soil in years, or indeed at all.
In her book, A Field of One’s Own, Bina Agarwal, a development economist, proved that owning land is the pivotal point around which women derive their bargaining power, their protection from domestic violence, their access to credit, and their ability to recover economically. Without ownership, a woman farmer is a ghost to the State’s machinery. She is not eligible for Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi, which provides Rs 6,000 annually only to land-owning farmers. She cannot get a Kisan Credit Card or crop insurance. She is, in the language of policy, not a farmer: merely ‘unpaid family labour’.
In 2005, daughters were given the rights of coparcenary in ancestral property through an amendment to the Hindu Succession Act. Legal provisions for women’s land inheritance are there officially, but, according to a 2021 Landesa study, only 13% women in Uttar Pradesh and Odisha have legal documents for the land on which they farm. The difference between legal right and real experience is not just a gap of awareness but also a gap of power, patriarchal norms, administrative indifference, and a policy framework that still recognises landowners, not cultivators, as legitimate farmers.
President Droupadi Murmu has spoken about giving women a larger say in policy-making and decision-making in agriculture. Such sentiments, however sincere, do not rewrite a land record. This year’s Union budget has not proposed any separate measure for joint land titling, or a special provision for women’s land expansion, or a change in PM-Kisan eligibility criteria to recognise cultivators instead of just owners. The Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana, the only initiative aimed at women farmers’ empowerment, gets a small share of the budgetary distribution allotted to Namo Drone Didi, an initiative that provides drones to women’s self-help groups for agricultural services.
The Food and Agriculture Organization has suggested that if the gender gap in agriculture can be bridged, global food production is likely to go up by 20%-30%. India’s Viksit Bharat ambitions hinge heavily on enhancing agricultural productivity. But a country where the majority of farm workers are kept legally landless is committing not only a moral failure but also an economic one.