In a first-of-its-kind initiative to empower women labourers in the agricultural sector, Maharashtra has framed a new law enabling them to access a host of benefits such as credit, subsidies and crop insurance without any land holding.
The Women Farmers Empowerment Act, 2026, passed recently in both houses of the Maharashtra state legislature, recognises women engaged in agriculture and allied activities as ‘farmers’ and provides them with a ‘woman farmer certificate’. This certificate would enable them to access entitlements and benefits of the various government schemes currently available to landholders.
“We will bring millions of women agricultural labourers into the government records and provide them all the benefits of the schemes available to largely male land-holding farmers,” Dattatreya Bharane, agriculture minister of Maharashtra, told FE. According to Bharane, there are around 1.5 crore to 1.6 crore women agricultural labourers in the state who are largely excluded from various schemes because they do not hold lands.
According to the agriculture census 2015-16, women hold barely 15.5% of the agricultural land in Maharashtra against the national average of around 12%.
This is the first legislation of its kind in the country, which recognises women engaged in agriculture and allied activities like fisheries, livestock rearing, poultry farming, and collection of forest produce. The government has acknowledged that women who cultivate family or community land without holding formal titles are often counted as agricultural labourers rather than farmers.
The requirement of land ownership as a precondition for accessing most agricultural schemes and underlying entitlements has rendered various schemes inaccessible to many women farmers, since only a very small percentage of these women own agricultural land, according to an official note.
“This systemic non-recognition of women farmers and their agricultural labour is significant and leads to other forms of exclusion, including, but not limited to discrimination in access to schemes, credit and markets,” the legislation passed in both houses of Maharashtra stated.
Women who are engaged in allied non-cultivation-based activities such as fishing, collection of minor forest produce, poultry, animal husbandry etc., are also not recognised as farmers, officials said.
New Institutional Framework
The new legislation also provides for setting up a women farmer empowerment council, a women farmer empowerment cell, a state monitoring committee, a database of women farmers and a Maharashtra State Fund for Women Farmers.
Bharane said that under the state government’s Punyashlok Ahilya Holkar waiver scheme, about 56 lakh farmers with outstanding credit balances exceeding Rs 2 lakh will receive relief provided they settle the excess amount and the state government would incur a cost of Rs 36,585 crore. The state government earlier implemented farm loan waivers in 2017 and 2020.
