Data from the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI) village surveys conducted over the last 15 years, in 27 villages in different agro-ecological regions of the country show that women’s access to agricultural land is limited. In Kerala, under a unique experiment, women’s groups under the umbrella of Kudumbashree have been able to gain access to agricultural land and engage in crop cultivation. Kudumbashree, an organisation that is part of the Government of Kerala’s poverty eradication programme, is a three-tier decentralised women’s organisation.

Women in collective farming (Source: Kudumbashree)

In 2018, Madhav Tipu Ramachandran and Arindam Das undertook a survey of 15 selected Kudumbashree joint liability groups in Thrissur and Thiruvananthapuram districts in order to study the viability and profitability of group farming. Their findings have been published in the Canadian Journal of Development Studies (Ramachandran and Das, 2020).

The study is the first to use the PARI questionnaire designed to collect data on gross value of output and total costs of cultivation in order to estimate farm business income or net income from cultivation of farming undertaken by Kudumbashree groups. For each group, the paper estimates gross value of output, i.e, sum total of value of main product and value of by-product, by crop and operational holding. The identification and calculation of costs broadly follows the method proposed by the Commission for Agricultural Cost and Prices (CACP) and the paper estimates paid out costs (Cost A2), Cost A2+Family labour as well as Cost C2. Earlier studies of women’s collective farming including Kudumbashree (Agarwal 2018a and 2018b) have not used these comprehensive cost formulae. A revisit was made in November 2018 after the devastating flood in Kerala.

The study reports on gross and net incomes from group farming, as well as variations across crops and by size of operational holding, and tries to understand the factors related to higher returns. The paper also discusses the role of institutional support (from the Kudumbashree organisation) and of public support (from the government of Kerala and other public institutions such as banks) in making group farming viable.

The full reference to the paper is as follows.

Ramachandran, M.T and Das, A. (2020), “Collective farming and women’s livelihoods: a case study of Kudumbashree group cultivation,” Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue Canadienne d’Etudes du Développement, DOI:10.1080/02255189.2020.1799764.

References

Agarwal, B. (2018 a) “Does Group Farming Empower Rural Women? The Indian Experience,” Discussion Paper No. 20, UN Women, New York.

— (2018 b) “Can group farms outperform individual family farms? Empirical insights from India,” World Development, 108, pp. 57-73.