Agricultural wage work, seasonal migration and the widening gender gap: evidence from a semi-arid region of Andhra Pradesh

Abstract

In India, there are large gender disparities in ownership of agricultural land and the state's poverty alleviation programmes mainly target landless male labourers. Given these conditions, agricultural wage work was the only avenue through which poor rural women could expect to become financially independent and combat iniquitous social norms. This development paradigm was the guiding force behind the feminization of agricultural wage work in India. This study investigates the linkages between female work and empowerment implicit to the process of feminization for the semi-arid regions of Andhra Pradesh. We find that women here are heavily involved in agricultural wage work mainly because better paying work like self-employment and seasonal migration are beyond the reach of most women. As a result women's wages, working conditions and relative power within the household remain acutely depressed. Furthermore, evidence suggests that income from seasonal migration is causing the wealth gap between men and women to widen. Policies with a clearer focus on improving women's off-farm opportunities and those that challenge patriarchal control over productive assets are required.

La féminisation croissante du travail salarié agricole en Inde a mis en lumière la relation problématique entre le travail des femmes et leurs capacité à être financièrement indépendantes et donc de contester les inégalités de genre. Cet article se penche sur la question à partir de données provenant des régions semi-arides d'Andhra Pradesh. Nous constatons que les femmes y sont fortement impliquées dans le travail salarié agricole principalement parce qu'un travail mieux payé tel que le travail indépendant ou la migration saisonnière n'est pas à la portée de la plupart d'entre-elles. Les salaires des femmes, leurs conditions de travail, ainsi que leur pouvoir de décision au sein de leurs ménages demeurent en conséquence très insuffisantes. Les données présentées suggèrent aussi que le revenu de la migration saisonnière masculine est en train d'élargir l'écart financier entre les hommes et les femmes. Des politiques se focalisant spécifiquement sur l'amélioration des possibilités d'emploi non-agricole pour les femmes, et qui cherchent explicitement à contester le contrôle patriarcal des actifs productifs sont nécessaires afin de changer cette situation.

Keywords:

• wage work
• seasonal migration
• gender
• semi-arid
• Andhra Pradesh
• India

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support received from the Department for International Development (award number R7617) and Newton Trust (award number INT 2.05d). The author is deeply indebted to her enumerators: Achari, Chandrasekhar, Lakshmama, Narsimhlu, Lakshmi, Padma, Ravi, Rathish and Sridevi for their unflinching dedication to the project. The author is grateful to Sara Horrell and Barbara Harriss-White for useful comments on an earlier version of this paper. The author alone is responsible for any errors. Please send comments to [email protected].

Notes

 1. For a complete list of schemes see Dhage (2007), Gupta (2007), and Lal, Srivastava, and Singh (2007).

 2. To some extent these criticisms were addressed by changing successive versions of the schemes but with only partial success. For instance, the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana was launched in 2001 by merging the EAS and the JGSY and the National Food for Work Programme was started in 2004. More recently in 2006 a landmark legislation was introduced which resulted in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme which for the first time guarantees 100 days of unskilled manual work in a year to any adult member of a rural household. It is still too early to determine if this scheme has been effective in generating gender neutral off-farm employment opportunities.

 3. The Employment Guarantee scheme operated by the state government of Maharashtra is largely an exception to this general trend (e.g., Dev 1992; Ravallion, Dart, and Chaudhuri 1993). Nearly 60% of the jobs created are taken up by women and in rural Maharashtra, the scheme is in fact referred to as a ‘women's programme’ (Dev 1992).

 4. The district is severely drought-prone and has recorded over 32 drought years since records started in 1924 (Government of AP 2002). On the other hand, historical underinvestment in irrigation means that a mere 10.4% of cultivable land is irrigated (Sajja 2003). These factors make surviving during the dry months a formidable challenge for small peasants and are the reasons why seasonal migration has overtime become central to the livelihood strategies of the poor in the district.

 5. Deshingkar and Start (2003) report similar intensity of migration for villages in AP and Madhya Pradesh. They find that, while on average 25% of the households in AP and 52% of those in MP had at least one member migrating, for the dry villages this could go up to 78% in AP and 75% in MP.

 6. A total of 302 households were surveyed but, six de facto female and four de facto male headed households and one income outlier were excluded from the analysis. The interviews were carried out by a group of two interviewers, one male and one female. The author participated in over a third of all interviews. For details on methodology and survey protocol see Chapter 2 in Horrell, Johnson and Mosley (2008).

 7. AP's census data for 2001 support the finding that men are moving into cultivation and non-agrarian work while women are taking over agricultural work. According to the census, 60.7% of female rural workers are agricultural labourers compared to only 37.8% of men and while 27.3% of male workers are involved in the non-agrarian sector, only 11.4% of women are involved in such work (Government of India 2001).

 8. A considerable number of L+(19.1%) and SF (30.5%) households were also involved in ‘tied harvest’ arrangements – another means by which landlords may secure the credit extended to labour households. Under these arrangements labour households pledge their harvest at well below the market price. The burden of ‘tied harvest’ also falls disproportionately on women since they spend 88.3% of their non-domestic work time in agriculture as compared to 53.2% of male time (see Table 2).

 9. Given the scope of the present paper, here we discuss just one dimension of gender relations in labour households – control over incomes. Interested readers are referred to a companion paper, Garikipati (2006) in which we examine the gender dynamics of labour households in greater detail.

10. As mentioned earlier, more recently state programmes like DWCRA and SHG have focused on self-employment of rural women from poor households. The SHG programme was operational in the survey villages and while it has helped women move into self-employment, there are several problems in its implementation (for more on this see Garikipati 2008b).

11. Sundaram and Vanneman (2008) examine gender differentials in literacy across 409 Indian districts. Their analysis shows that girls have relatively lower literacy compared to boys in areas where more women are in the labour force. Perversely higher female participation rates, they conclude, may have been responsible for withdrawal of girls from education.