Role of women in rural development

Indian women, and rural women in particular, play many social and economic roles inside as well as outside the home, but their contribution does not receive due recognition. They have been excluded from the various training and rural development programmes which usually involve the menfolk, being offered only programmes related to child health, nutrition and so on. This can be attributed to the planners' neglect of the contributions and potential of women. The paper examines the participation of rural women in home and farm activities in the state of Haryana, India. It indicates the invisibility of the majority of women, who act as unpaid workers on the family farm. Care of livestock is a female domain but as dairy work is becoming modernized, women are losing control of both management and economic returns. Training of women in animal husbandry is found to be totally neglected. The level of improved household technology, too, is very unsatisfactory, more especially in backward regions where the majority of women are still working with age-old tools. Over half the respondents had no leisure time. The paper suggests a number of measures to help rural women, whose working day is often considerably longer than that of men.