Towards recognising women farmers

Agriculture in India has long been defined through land ownership, not actual labour. The National Policy for Farmers, 2007 first proposed an activity-based, land-delinked definition of 'farmer' (meaning: someone who tills, sows or manages a farm, regardless of whether their name appears on the land title), but this definition was never given legal teeth. A similar national attempt lapsed when a bill was introduced in the Rajya Sabha in 2011 and was never passed. Because land is a State subject under India's constitutional scheme, individual States have had to act on their own: Kerala's Kudumbashree network has long enabled women to farm collectively through self-help groups, and Odisha's KALIA scheme has extended support to landless and sharecropper women. What India lacked until recently was a State-level registry of women farmers that did not depend on land records at all.

In July 2026, Maharashtra passed the Women Farmers' Empowerment Bill, introducing a Woman Farmer Certificate that recognises any woman engaged in agriculture for at least one season a year as a farmer, irrespective of land ownership. This is the first Indian State law to give enforceable legal form to the 2007 policy's land-delinked definition. It followed three decades of advocacy by women farmers' movements and civil society organisations, who have used petitions, public campaigns and sustained lobbying of lawmakers, methods interest groups commonly use to influence agricultural policy, mirroring how farmers' organisations more broadly have shaped policy in India through protest, negotiation and alliance-building with sympathetic legislators.