Study on rural women empowerment through vegetable production

Abstract

Women have become an indispensable part of all the agricultural activities starting from sowing/transplantation, inter-cultivation, harvesting, grading, processing, marketing and cooking tasty vegetable dishes. They also maintain kitchen gardens for sustainable vegetable production for home consumption and thus, maintain the nutritional security of the family. Women are also engaged in small- to large-scale vegetable processing and seed production. In rural areas, women perform marketing activities in vegetables. Women immensely contribute in maintaining the country’s food and nutritional security, though their contribution is unrecognized and underweighted. Vegetable production has shorter duration and can provide early economic returns to the farmers. Therefore, it has immense potential to be one of the best suitable, remunerative and affordable enterprises which can be taken up by farm women paving the way for their socio-economic empowerment. A sample of 54 women vegetable growers were selected and the analysis of the data revealed that cent per cent of the women in the sample were all illiterates and around 76% of the sample respondents were below poverty line. The average number of mandays they worked was around 22.5 per month employed for 6 months in a year. Men earned around 12% of higher wages than women. The annual average wage income earned by the women workers was Rs. 23214 and they saved around Rs. 5040 (21.7%) per year. The only focus required is to provide them access to credit needs, suitable vegetable production training programmes, low cost technologies, market access, and extension awareness services.