New Delhi: With growing rural to urban migration of men, there is widespread feminisation of the agriculture sector.
Women are increasingly donning multiple roles as cultivators, entrepreneurs and labourers, according to the Economic Survey 2017-18 released here on Monday.
The survey said that world over there was empirical evidence that women have a decisive role in ensuring food security and preserving local agro-biodiversity.
“Rural women are responsible for the integrated management and use of diverse natural resources to meet the daily household needs”. The survey goes on to say that this requires that women farmers should have enhanced access to resources like land, water, credit, technology and training which warrants critical analysis in the context of India.
Apart from this, the differential access of women to resources like land, credit, water, seeds and markets needs to be addressed.
Towards this, the government has been implementing various schemes which help improve the entitlements of women farmers, which will prove to be advantageous in bridging the policy gaps which exits in the sector.
The Economic Survey also said that climate change could adversely affect farmers income by up to 20-25 per cent in the medium term.
It warned of the need for “dramatic” improvement in irrigation, use of new technologies and better targeting of power and fertiliser subsidies.
It has also asked the government to take radical follow-up action to achieve its objective of addressing agricultural stress and doubling farmers’ income.
Since agriculture is a state subject and an open political economy question, the survey strongly advocated a mechanism similar to the GST Council to bring more reforms in the agriculture sector and boost farmers income.
Cut pendency in litigation to boost business activity: Survey
The Economic Survey called for coordinated action between government and judiciary to reduce pendency of commercial litigation. It said the initiative would help in improving ease of doing business (EODB) and boost economic activities. The survey pointed out that although India jumped to 100th rank in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Report 2018, the country continues to lag on the indicator on enforcing contracts. The survey said that there is a need to address the issues of pendency, delays and backlogs in the appellate and judicial arenas towards ease of doing business. It said that the issues hamper dispute resolution, contract enforcement, discourage investment, stall projects, hamper tax collection, stress tax payers and escalate legal costs.
Tarikh-par-tarikh finds place in ES
The Economic Survey had its fair share of Bollywoodian nuggets, and chief among them was actor Sunny Deol’s dialogue “tarikh-par-tarikh (dates after dates)”, which was used to highlight the frequent delays in the judicial process. “The now iconic scream of ‘tarikh-par-tarikh, tarikh-par-tarikh’ by Sunny Deol in the film Damini was Bollywood’s counterpart to Shakespeare: two different expressional forms — the one loud and melodramatic, the other brooding and self-reflective — but both nevertheless united in forcefully articulating the frustrations of delayed and-hence-denied justice,” it said.
A well-known song from Manoj Kumar-starrer Upkaar, Mere desh ki dharti sona ugle ugle heerey moti, figured in the climate change and agriculture chapter of the survey.
It said the bounty of Indian agriculture romanticised in this famous song — which also underlines the Prime Minister’s goal of doubling farmers’ income — increasingly runs up against the contemporary realities of Indian agriculture, and the harsher prospects of its vulnerability to long-term climate change.
