It was mid-June last year. Schools had just begun. I happened to visit a primary school to attend a drawing competition on ‘An Indian farmer’.

The students wore freshly ironed uniforms, and the pleats were so neat they almost looked new. Each student had a designated box of fresh crayons ranging from plastic to oil pastels. The bell rang and the competition began. The participants started drawing with their well-trained hands on the crisp white drawing sheets. While glancing over the sheets, two common things stayed with me - the turban and the moustache. Well I was not surprised.

It took me back to a memory. The memory of a ‘sandwiched house’.

It was during an academic research some years ago, that I had stopped by - near a house – off-grid, and away from all that we call modern. 

It was built with broken bricks, that were sporadically sandwiched between thin layers of mud and sand. It was Bakula’s place. At the entrance of the house, my head met with a string of dried flowers dangling in an ‘U’ shape. I tried to peep inside to get access to Bakula. It was dark inside. I managed to get a blurry view of a girl dressed up in a torn off school uniform. She lit up a diya (mud lamp), putting some drops of oil from a dented jar kept near the chulha (mud stove). Her tender hands were unusually careful not to pour an extra drop of oil. The lamp was then quarterly filled and lit up. My feet took a step back intuitively.

As I flipped around, I saw a lady riding a bicycle, making her way through the bushes and the mushy road towards the brick sandwiched house. Her hands looked so firm and strong that it reminded me of an athlete. She appeared to be pushing the pedal fenced by her saree in a scurry. Seeing us, she leaned her stand-less bicycle on the sandwiched wall and came running with gusto.

It was Bakula - the fulcrum of this household. But, perhaps, she was neither the head of the family nor the part owner of a tiny crop land where she toiled day and night- from dusk till dawn’.

Bakula offered us some water from her neat earthen pot, which offered a much-needed relief from the heat. While we were waiting to visit her farm (her husband’s farm), she firmly embossed a pinch of sindoor[1] on her prematurely wrinkled forehead.

Bakula offered us a chapatti (flattened bread) broken into two halves and some grounded jaggery. I asked her to join us, but she refused, “I don’t eat at this time’’. I knew why - the bread was scarce. An irony, where the bread winner did not have enough bread for herself!

We left for the farm where Bakula worked, joined by a group of other female labourers. It was the sowing season. They started ploughing the field with the glowing sun on their head. With that beaming sunlight they looked like goddesses of food - Annapurna (Hindu goddess of food and nutrition).

Bakula was a month pregnant then. But she had no maternity leave. The much-celebrated amended Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act does not help these women in the field and that is true for most women labourers in unorganized sectors like agriculture, waste-picking, daily-wage earners.

Bakula is just another invisible farmer who cannot reap any benefits from the policies that were created for them. Toiling from dusk to dawn, her journey revolves around growing crops and feeding her family. She runs the household, even though she is not the “owner’ of the farm that her husband had inherited from his father.

There are millions of women farmers like Bakula without any rights to land ownership. We surely have a long way to go – however we can begin by teaching our children that not all farmers come with moustache and turbans. Sometimes they are clad in sarees with pallus drawn over their heads to protect them from the scorching heat. The woman who feeds them can also grow the food!

Priyanka Walanj is a National Consultant on the Plastic Waste Management team at UNDP India