How does India's agrarian crisis harm women workers?

The crisis of India's agrarian sector has been widely reported amid spates of farmer suicides and mass protest as incomes decline and indebtedness rises in response to falling productivity. What are the underlying causes of this persist crisis in India's agriculture? Is it right that we understand these phenomenon as 'crisis'? Who are the winners and losers? In particular, how are women workers disproportionately affected by the current upheavals?

Dr Shreya Sinha is Senior Lecturer in Business and Society at Queen Mary, University of London. She joins Dr Remi Edwards to discuss her paper 'Shifting agrarian labour regimes, ecology, and the crisis for Dalit women’s work in India' (2024) recently published in the Journal of Economic Geography. They consider what makes the conditions of Indian agriculture a 'crisis', social reproduction and the crisis' effects on women workers, the relationship between ecology and labour, and how political ecology and political economy can help make sense of the situation.