Maharashtra’s Women Farmers’ Law Recognises Landless Women as Farmers Through a ‘Woman Farmer Certificate’

The news

Maharashtra. In July 2026, Maharashtra passed the Women Farmers’ Empowerment Bill, which grants women independent recognition as farmers irrespective of whether they own land, through a document called the ‘Woman Farmer Certificate’. Writing in The Hindu, Sanchit Gupta and Tanu M. Goyal of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) call it the first Indian State legislation to give enforceable legal form to the activity-based, land-delinked definition of ‘farmer’ that the National Policy for Farmers set out in 2007 but never operationalised. In plain words, a farmer is whoever actually farms, not whoever holds the title deed. A comparable national Bill, introduced in the Rajya Sabha in 2011, lapsed. The Act broadens the definitions of ‘agriculture’ and ‘farmer’ to cover women residents engaged in agriculture for at least one agricultural season a year, irrespective of the nature of the land, and names landless cultivators, landless livestock rearers, agricultural labourers, plantation labourers and pastoralists. Women will be identified by self-registration or by the Gram Sabha, and a new database of women farmers will be built. In 2025 agriculture employed roughly 110 million women and 127 million men (rural, per the Periodic Labour Force Survey, Census-adjusted); women’s farm workforce has more than doubled since 2017-18, and nearly three-quarters of rural women workers are in agriculture, against less than half of men. More than 41% of female agricultural workers were unpaid in 2025, against 20% of men, while nearly 63% of men were own-account workers against 39% of women. Yet only 14% of operational holdings are with women (Agriculture Census 2015-16), because land records are mostly in men’s names and every State uses its land revenue records as the ‘source of truth’ for schemes. Women are only 23% of beneficiaries of PM-KISAN, which pays ₹6,000 a year to eligible landholding farmer families, and below one-third in most States. Meghalaya (70%) and Kerala (44%) stand apart because of matrilineal and customary tenure and Kudumbashree group farming; in Jammu & Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh, women are nearly two-thirds of the workforce but a small fraction of beneficiaries. The authors urge linking the certificates to Agri Stack, the Union Agriculture Ministry’s digital platform, and issuing Farmer IDs to women, noting that the United Nations has named 2026 the International Year of the Woman Farmer. The syllabus link is GS1 (role of women) and GS3 (land reforms, farm support).

Static syllabus linkage

1. The National Policy for Farmers, 2007 defined a farmer by the work done, not the title held. The National Policy for Farmers, 2007 was adopted by the Union government on the basis of the reports of the National Commission on Farmers chaired by M.S. Swaminathan. It defined a ‘farmer’ as a person actively engaged in the economic or livelihood activity of growing crops and producing other primary agricultural commodities, and expressly included agricultural labourers, sharecroppers, tenants, poultry and livestock rearers, fishers, beekeepers, pastoralists and planting labourers, as well as tribal families engaged in shifting cultivation and the collection of forest produce. A policy statement, however, creates no enforceable entitlement, so schemes continued to use land ownership as the eligibility test. The Women Farmers’ Entitlements Bill, 2011, a private member’s Bill moved by Swaminathan as a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha, sought statutory recognition for women farmers but lapsed. Maharashtra’s law is the first State statute to convert the 2007 definition into law.
2. Land and land records are State subjects, which is why a State could lead. Entry 14 of the State List covers agriculture, Entry 18 covers land, including rights in or over land, land tenures and the relation of landlord and tenant, and Entry 45 covers land revenue, including the maintenance of land records and records of rights. The record of rights, known by names such as the 7/12 extract in Maharashtra and the jamabandi in the north, is therefore a State document, and it is the document most welfare schemes rely on. The Centre’s role is to fund and standardise digitisation through the Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme. Because the gatekeeping document is a State record, a State law is the natural place to create an alternative route to recognition.
3. Women’s legal right to agricultural land has run ahead of the records. Section 4(2) of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956 originally left the devolution of tenancy rights in agricultural land to State tenancy laws, many of which favoured male heirs. The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 omitted that clause and made daughters coparceners in the joint family property with the same rights as sons. In Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020), the Supreme Court held that a daughter’s coparcenary right exists by birth, regardless of whether the father was alive on the date of the 2005 amendment. The law of inheritance is thus largely equal on paper for Hindu women, but mutation of land records in their favour depends on practice, family pressure and local administration, which is why ownership figures remain low.
4. PM-KISAN and Agri Stack both run on land records. PM-KISAN is a Central Sector Scheme, fully funded by the Union government, launched in February 2019, that transfers ₹6,000 a year in three equal instalments of ₹2,000 directly into the bank accounts of landholding farmer families, defined as husband, wife and minor children. It excludes institutional landholders, income-tax payers, holders of constitutional posts and certain professionals. Agri Stack, built under the Digital Agriculture Mission approved by the Union Cabinet in September 2024, has three registries: a Farmers’ Registry that issues a unique Farmer ID, geo-referenced village maps and a Crop Sown Registry. Because the Farmer ID is seeded from land records, any exclusion in those records is carried into the digital system unless an activity-based entry route, such as Maharashtra’s certificate, is added.

Why UPSC loves this

1. The syllabus names the issue in two papers. GS1 covers the role of women and women’s organisations and social empowerment, while GS3 covers land reforms, direct and indirect farm subsidies and e-technology to aid farmers. ‘Feminisation of agriculture’ is a standard Mains theme, and examiners reward answers that separate women’s rising participation from their lack of ownership, credit and recognition. This story supplies a fresh legislative example and hard numbers on the recognition gap.
2. Prelims tests scheme design and data sources. UPSC regularly asks about eligibility conditions of flagship schemes such as PM-KISAN, the agencies that run surveys such as the Periodic Labour Force Survey and the Agriculture Census, and the concept of an operational holding. It also asks about International Years declared by the United Nations. The Maharashtra law connects all of these, and a student who understands why a land-based scheme excludes women can answer statement questions that test the difference between ownership and operation.
3. The interview board likes the federal angle. Because land is a State subject and a national Bill lapsed, the story illustrates how States act as laboratories of policy. A candidate may be asked whether the Maharashtra model should be adopted nationally, and must be able to argue both the case for standardisation and the risk of a one-size-fits-all identity scheme.

Analysis

1. The certificate fixes identity, but the money still follows the land. The Maharashtra law lets a landless woman prove she is a farmer, but PM-KISAN, the largest direct transfer to farmers, is defined by landholding under Union guidelines that no State can rewrite. A certificate therefore unlocks State schemes and perhaps extension services, but not the central cash transfer, unless the Centre adds an activity-based eligibility route. The real test of the law is how many State schemes, credit products and insurance enrolments accept the certificate as sufficient. Without that, it risks becoming a card of recognition without a key to any door. The counter-view is that identity must come first, since no scheme can be redesigned for a group that has never been counted.
2. Gram Sabha identification is both the strength and the weak point. Verification by the Gram Sabha is sensible because neighbours know who actually works the fields, and it avoids the cost of a new bureaucracy. But Gram Sabhas are often dominated by landowning men and dominant castes, the very groups whose interests may be threatened if a daughter-in-law or a Dalit labourer acquires an independent claim. Self-registration avoids that gatekeeping but opens the door to inflated or duplicate claims. A workable design would combine the two: self-registration with a public list read out in a special women’s Gram Sabha, and a time-bound appeal to the block office. The authors’ call for a robust information campaign is not a detail; it decides who hears about the right at all.
3. Digital agriculture will hard-code the old bias unless it is rebuilt now. Agri Stack’s Farmer ID is seeded from land records, so the digital system is being built on the same gatekeeper that excluded women on paper. Digital systems scale whatever rules they are given: an exclusion that once needed a clerk’s discretion becomes automatic across crores of records. This is why the authors’ recommendation to link the certificate to Agri Stack is the most important line in the article. The window to add an ‘activity-based farmer’ field is now, while the registries are being populated, because retrofitting identity systems later is costly and slow.
4. Recognising women farmers must not become a way of accepting distress. Much of the rise in women’s farm work reflects men leaving for non-farm jobs and women staying behind on small, low-productivity plots, often as unpaid family labour. There is a risk that recognition is celebrated as empowerment while the underlying pattern, women left in the least rewarding sector, is ignored. The honest answer is that recognition is necessary but not sufficient: it gives access to credit, machinery subsidies and training, which can raise productivity, but the long-run goal is also better non-farm opportunities for rural women. The 41% unpaid share shows the problem is not just identity but control over income.
5. Standardisation across States will decide whether this spreads or fragments. Land is a State subject, and a national Bill lapsed in 2011, so progress will come State by State. That is useful experimentation, but if every State defines ‘woman farmer’ differently, a migrant woman or a pastoralist moving across State lines may be recognised in one and not in the next. The authors propose common definitions, certificate formats and databases across States, which the Centre could encourage through Agri Stack standards without legislating on a State subject. Meghalaya and Kerala show that alternative institutions, customary tenure and collectives, already raise women’s access; the lesson is that the channel matters more than the title.

Administrator's brainstorm