Women in India’s Digital Agriculture Push

April 9, 2026

The Union Budget 2026-27 has placed a strategic bet on the agricultural sector by prioritising agri-tech — with significant funds mobilisation towards AI-driven advisory services, precision farming systems, and tech-enabled resource efficiency. While experts have welcomed the move as a step toward technology-led, outcome-driven agriculture growth aiming for enhancing productivity and farm incomes; yet, a crucial question remains: what will be its social implications, particularly for women farmers, and where do they stand in this unfolding transformation?

In recent years, digitalisation has moved to the centre of India’s agricultural policy imagination. Initiatives such as Digital Agricultural Mission or agri-based tech firms are being projected as a panacea to transform the sector through real-time crop monitoring, satellite-enabled weather alerts, targeted pest and nutrient management, or data-driven yields analytics. However, beneath this “techno-optimist” narrative lies a side that is often overlooked or does not attract adequate attention, creating a persistent blind spot: the structural “invisibilisation” of women farmers, whether smallholders, landless, Dalit, Adivasi or any other systemically marginalised agrarian labourers.

Despite constituting the backbone of India’s agrarian economy, women remain structurally marginalised within it. While nearly 85 per cent of rural women are engaged in agriculture, their labour continues to be undervalued and poorly recognised in official accounting systems. This produces a striking paradox: high participation but minimal visibility.

This marginalisation is rooted in a deeply gendered and male-centric agrarian terrain. Barely 13 per cent women have formal land-asset ownership, which directly restricts their access to institutional credit, subsidies, crop insurance and government support schemes. As a result a significant proportion of women remain heavily concentrated in “unpaid family labour” — a trend that has reportedly risen sharply over the past decade. This exclusion from asset ownership and formal farmer identity thus translates into limited bargaining power within households, weakens the role in decision-making, restricts their ability to access markets independently and their rightful place in programme policies which are often designed around the male member of a household as the default beneficiary. (Courtesy: DTE)