Knowledge Intensive Agriculture for Attaining Sustainable Development Goals: Role of Indian Women

Abstract

Agriculture is sin-qua-non to core Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Any efforts for enhancing agriculture productivity, improving the lot of farmers and adopting sustainable agricultural practices provide a natural push for attaining SDGs. However, government agricultural policies, agricultural reforms and amelioration of the agricultural activities must benefit the farmers. The Government of India thus set up a panel on doubling farmers’ income by the year 2022. Agriculture reforms such as reducing cost of cultivation, enhancing productivity and profit centric approaches are on the anvil. Indian agriculture is also facing several problems such as climate change, soil degradation and lowering of ground water levelsatsome areas, increasing cost of agricultural inputs, storage and marketing of agricultural produce and growing number of small and marginal farmers. In spite of agricultural subsidies, free electric power supply at some places, waiving of farmers’ loans, enormous infrastructure for agriculture research, incidences of farmers committing suicides are sometimes heard. To meet the triple challenges of increasing agricultural productivity, enhancing farmers’ income and pursuing sustainable agricultural practices, knowledge sharing is essential. Though woman agricultural workers are by and large involved in agricultural chores such as paddy planting, harvesting of tea leaves and cotton crop and food processing at home, their engagement at higher level of crop planning, their capacity building for knowledge intensive agricultural will make available more talent, creativity and knowledge for agricultural pursuits. Adopting the case analysis, exploratory, descriptive and observational methods of research, this paper portrays some cases where enhanced women participation of educated women in agricultural pursuits led to better agricultural productivity and enhanced farmers’ income. Presents a study of select rural areas depicting problems of women participation in knowledge intensive agricultural practices and suggests measures for their greater involvement in agricultural work to improve agricultural productivity and enhance agriculture based income.