 Just the other day, a bureaucrat who had seen this advertisement, he said, why are you talking about women in farming? Everybody knows that women are dropping out of farming. Employment of women is coming down. And it's absolutely true that the big decline of employment of women that is being noticed and finally being admitted by the government as well in the latest labour force survey, a large part of that is women in agriculture. We have, of course, then the impact of India's engagement with the global economy, which affects that viability. Women farmers have always had specific difficulties. The absence of land titles, the fact that many of them are not recognized as farmers, why many, most of them are not recognized as farmers. And that in turn affects all kinds of other things. Access to institutional credit, in fact, even access to non-institutional credit, access to inputs, access to government programs and schemes, all of the major announcements that governments make, they are excluded from that. And we have a huge range of issues, very large gender gaps, some of the largest in the world in terms of women workers in agriculture. Then there's the whole issue of unpaid work. I want to say that the main resource factor for agriculture, which is land, how these 244 million men and women have access to land. And the first thing that I want to point out is that the land available for household operational holdings has gone down drastically, 91, 92. They said 125 million hectares of land was available for household operational farming. In 2002-03, this came down to 107 million hectares. And in 2012-13, it is only 94 million hectares land, which is available for household operational holdings. There are about 108 million holdings in agriculture with 94 million hectares of land. So average land per holding comes less than 1 hectare. It is 0.8 hectare. So basically, 93% of holdings are of such small size that the household labor is not able to be usefully employed in their own farms. And when you look at this figure of availability of land and distribution of land, I think it is very frightening. And no economic policy can solve the agrarian crisis unless you have taken care of this basic lopsided availability and distribution of land. That importance has not yet been addressed. And land rights in the context of women are seen as a complete enemy. That is why the assembly alone has passed the bill twice and sent that the rights of women should be removed. Now in 2005, in the ancestral property which was amended, it will also have its rights to get equal rights. Till date, there are some other governments who have not yet notified it. Three decades, starting early 1980s, the NSS data and the census started showing that the share of women in agricultural workforce was rising. This rise in share of women was primarily led by men leaving the villages. So, you also had regions and crops where there was a phase of increased labor deployment of women in agriculture. This sort of period of feminization of agriculture having different kinds of drivers of what lay inside. Now, there were two things that did not happen along on this. One was that this feminization of agricultural workforce was not uniform across the kind of work that women did. One was that women continued to be employed predominantly in tasks as Jyothi was saying in tasks that were not directly paid. The second was that while there was an increase, this increase was not uniform across tasks. There were certain tasks that remained out of bounds for women. Plowing, of course, is the most important one where in South Asia women don't touch the plow. So, you know, even when men moved out of agriculture, men continued to do the plowing. Work which involved buying things from the market or selling things in the market remained in the hands of men. So, it was men who were getting the money when the crop was sold, crop that was grown by women. The driver that I think we need to recognize which was that along with feminization, you also had greater casualization of labor force and feminization was in fact a part of... the two were interrelated. I mean, casualization was in fact an instrument for mobilizing more female labor because women were cheaper to use and you had a large amount of female workforce that could not sort of say work eight hours a day. So, you basically had, you know, through the 1980s and 90s and to some extent even 2000s, a period in which greater deployment of female workforce happened. I think from that to now, we have moved into a situation where there has been some sort of reversal of this and I think we are in a phase which should be recognized as a phase of de-feminization of agriculture. In particular last four or five years, you have a phase in which a number of tasks that were done predominantly or exclusively by women have had a decline in labor absorption. Harvesting is mechanized in large parts of the country now with greater adoption of combined harvesters. The decline in labor absorption in weeding and harvesting are the two single most reasons why there has been a huge decline in labor absorption in agriculture in the last few years. There's a huge confusion about the Green Revolution because a lot of people think we created it and when Punjab erupted, I wrote a book called The Violence of the Green Revolution because it was really an imposition of the USAID, World Bank, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation to push their chemicals. It was as simple as that. They wanted a market for chemicals. The Green Revolution was for chemicals. The Second Green Revolution, as it's called, the GMO Revolution, the BT Cotton, which is totally failed in if today Maharashtra is in deep crisis. It's because of the BT Cotton. Interestingly, the budget speech had a sentence which said, now Anadata's will be Urjadatas because they're really planning to do what has happened to American agriculture, agriculture into production of commodities for biofuel and animal feed. So all of the sugar belt will become biofuel, ethanol. They're already changing Haryana into hybrid corn, which will be for mainly animal feed. So there's an attempt to absolutely wipe out the link between food and agriculture. So last year, out of the blue, there was suddenly this talk of zero-budget natural farming and the term made no sense. Zero cost is different from zero budget. Zero budget at this point is kind of an amoeba word that's meaning everything for everyone. There's an actual set of standards and principles which say you can do this and you can't do this. You can't have chemicals and you can't have GMOs. You can't have genetically modified organisms in an organic system. So the zero budget was floated to allow GMOs in and yet have the fig leaf of natural. So many small holdings where the land cannot be used properly, where the labor available in the land cannot be used properly. The only solution that I can think of is to pool labor and land together and have collectives. One basic principle of cooperative is that partners should be equal and therefore I want to start with marginal and small farmers pooling their land together and forming a cooperative and having labor collectives which are coordinated with these farms and then I am telling that land is not sufficient so everybody cannot be just in farming. So the input and output linkages with agriculture have to be reserved for this collective cooperative sector of agricultural labor and small and marginal farmers. Kudumbushri movement in Kerala where I have seen women getting together and really doing remarkable work. And the women who have been characterized as dispossessed farmers and disadvantaged workers in their disadvantages position they are more amenable to collective work much more amenable to collective work than men are. From the perspective of right to food campaign obviously the first thing we should be doing in the last few years we have been trying to incorporate is to look at the PDS itself differently and more creatively while there is the need for the public distribution system which needs to be universal with thinking of what are the ways for the PDS which is much more decentralized both in terms of FCI's procurement operations as well as in terms of the choice of what is given in the PDS basket so why does it have to be only rice and wheat can't it be include millets it needs to include pulses it needs to include oil seeds and can't it be in a way where we redesign the FCI where the local first uses the local and then we use the additional for areas where there is shortage because we do need that. Similarly if we look at the school midday meal scheme for instance can we think of the midday meal menus more creatively where it can be something that is more locally procured one other area which I think which needs to be highlighted is the whole issue of social protection for women in agriculture they talked about school they talked about health expenses for their children they didn't mention it directly but this whole thing of being in the brother's shadow so basically needing some social security pension kind of thing where are the systems for all of this for women who are not recognized as workers and the new thinking on social protection also I think is reflected in the social security code the draft that is in the government which is also very worker centric which is good in a way but the when worker itself when a worker is defined so narrowly and then you have this code which is all about contributory pensions contributory health insurance and contributory so on for workers then again women get left out left out of all of this left out of pensions left out of insurance left out of maternity entitlements and this is a set of women who are working hardest who are most malnourished one other issue link to all of this is the whole issue of child care so the whole issue of care work while we recognize that it is work and that that's the work women are doing what are the systems that we are thinking of to replace women individual women providing this care to what is the kind of community responsibility and state responsibility that is there as far as care is concerned so just to kind of end that none of this agriculture food nutrition linkages or social protection or BDS or care none of this is zero budget all of this is very expensive but they are also very good investments with very high returns women farmers when they themselves were completely conscious level raised a little bit on this issue if they themselves don't come forward then many farmers and other people are raising their voices but this issue actually where it is stuck in the wrong way which is stuck on top of this it is not coming from anywhere it is not coming from anywhere just like earlier there used to be that slogan think global act local and so on maybe our problem is that we always come up with very holistic solutions because we see the holistic we see the interrelations we see how all of the food system the nutrition system, the agriculture the employment, the pattern of public investment all of these are related we see all of that and then we provide the holistic response which is of course how it should be logically but maybe now we have to think holistically and act specifically so I think one of the very useful lessons for me from this extraordinarily interesting panel I think is that despite the massive nature of the problems and the complexity of the problems there are still spaces of intervention that are doable and that we can actually work together to do and it doesn't also mean that all of us have to go and do the same thing but that if all of us can work in our different ways and ally with the others who are working in these other individual things it's still possible to get somewhere