The FAS International Conference on “Women’s Work in Rural Economies,” organised in partnership with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation from November 30 to December 2, 2018, was held in Vayalar, Kerala.

The first session of the Conference began at 5 p. m. on November 30, 2018 with welcome remarks by Sandipan Baksi, Director, FAS.

This was followed by a minute of silence to mourn the sudden death of Dr. Amit Sengupta on November 28, 2018.

Madhura Swaminathan presented an introduction to the Conference. The conference is an outcome of an ongoing research project to study the role of women in rural production systems. The project aims to to document, describe, and analyse the myriad activities, economic as well as “non-economic,” in which women in rural India are engaged, and the relationships into which they enter as part of the process of production.

Aparajita Bakshi made a presentation the village studies programme of the Foundation, the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI). The Foundation has till date surveyed 25 villages across 12 States in the country as part of this programme.

V K Ramachandran spoke briefly of the history of the Punnapra-Vayalar movement.

Brinda Karat, Patron and former General Secretary of the All India Democratic Women’s Association, and Polit Bureau member, Communist Party of India (Marxist), inaugurated the Conference. She spoke on issues pertaining to women’s work. She spoke of the worsening unemployment crisis in India under the neo-liberal economic regime. She also emphasized the need to critically revisit the definitions of women’s work, and to develop more scientific ways to measure it. Referring particularly to the strenuous manual work that women workers have to do, she stressed the need to account for “the use of energy, the level of nutrition, the wear and tear of her body” while computing a woman’s wage. She also raised concerns pertaining to women’s work in minor forest produce collection. Such works are critical to the income of Adivasi women, but the economics of the activity, she said, was thoroughly understudied.

The first session after the inauguration, was on the concept of women’s work. Indira Hirway critically examined changes in the concept of work in the new definition by the International Labour Organization (ILO). She also stressed the value that the time-use method can add to the Labour Force Surveys (LFS) conducted by the ILO.

Madhura Swaminathan, Sanjukta Chakraborty, and Vijaykumar made a presentation on results from the time-use surveys conducted by the Foundation in 2017-18 in two villages of Karnataka, India.

The last presentation for the session, by Wendy Olson, described her study based on time-use data collected in villages in Uttar Pradesh and in Bangladesh.

 Find updates on the second and the third day of the Conference.