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Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

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MS Swaminathan’s unfinished dream for women farmers may finally see the light of day

At long last, a new Rajya Sabha Bill seeks to establish a national commission to secure the rights and entitlements of women farmers.

Who is a farmer? The person in whose name land is registered in revenue records, or the one who actually engages in agricultural production?

This was precisely the question raised by India’s most well-known agricultural scientist, Dr MS Swaminathan, in 2011 when he introduced the Women Farmers’ Entitlement Bill in the Rajya Sabha. The Bill proposed a comprehensive, gender-neutral definition of ‘farmer’ that included landless workers, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, fisherfolk, livestock rearers, and pastoralists, shifting the axis from ‘those who hold the land’ to those who ‘engage in agricultural livelihoods’. The Bill, however, was allowed to lapse.

Fortuitously, sixteen years later, as the UN and FAO have declared 2026 the International Year of the Woman Farmer, a Bill on similar lines has been introduced in the Rajya Sabha.

The National Commission for the Entitlements and Welfare of Women Farmers Bill, 2026, tabled on 13 March, seeks to establish a national commission to secure the rights and entitlements of women farmers.

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Green Revolution’s blind spot

Dr Swaminathan went on to receive the Bharat Ratna in 2024, and last year his comprehensive biography, The Man who Fed India, by his niece Priyambada Jayakumar, renewed attention on his life and work as the progenitor of the Green Revolution in India.

Two quotes from this book help set the context of the times and relate, even if tangentially, to his later concern about the exclusion of women farmers.

The first tells us about his foray into plant genetics.

“He was a product of his times; he was a product of history. He was preparing to be a doctor, but it was history that forced him to change and jump in to become an agricultural scientist because of the Bengal famine after finishing two years of medical studies. That was history part one. He had gotten a job under the then Federal Public Service Commission because his family felt that agriculture was going nowhere........

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