The Foundation for Agrarian Studies conducted Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) with two groups of women in Palakurichi village in Kilvelur Taluk of Nagapattinam District in Tamil Nadu on December 22 and 23, 2021. The first group consisted of twelve women from Scheduled Caste households mostly engaged in farm and non-farm manual work. The second group had eleven women from Backward Classes and Most Backward Classes households. These focus group discussions were carried out as part of a study by the International Labour Organization (ILO), that aims to understand the gendered impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on women in rural India.

Palakurichi is located at the tail end of the lower Cauvery Delta region in Tamil Nadu. The village is located 16 km from the nearest town Velankanni and 18 km from Nagapattinam. This village has been first studied in 1918 by Gilbert Slater from the Univeristy of Madras. Four more studies have taken place in the village subsequently with this being the fifth study in the past hundred years that looks at the agrarian relations in the village. The village was first surveyed by FAS in 2019 under the project on “Agrarian Relations in the Lower Cauvery Delta”.

Scheduled Caste households comprise about 60 per cent of the village population, while many of the remaining households belong to Backward Classes and Most Backward Classes. Only a single crop of paddy is cultivated in the village. There is limited availability of work in agriculture which forces households engaged in agricultural labour to turn to other non-agricultural employment as well. MGNREGS plays a vital role in the economy of the manual worker households. Other non-agricultural employment options were construction work, driving, and casual labour in the tourism industry in nearby Velankanni.