Smart Farming Must Be Inclusive

When we picture a farmer, the image that usually comes to mind is a man. But the reality of Indian agriculture tells a very different story. Women constitute nearly 64 to 76 per cent of the rural female workforce engaged in farming and allied activities. They sow, they harvest, they tend to cattle, and they manage households. Yet, far too often, their labour goes unpaid, their names do not appear on land records, and their voices are absent from the rooms where agricultural policy is made. Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha’s call to support women-led start-ups in agricultural technology is therefore not just a policy suggestion; it is a correction of a long-standing imbalance. When he says that women-led agri-tech start-ups should receive financing with the same confidence as any other enterprise, he is stating a principle that should have been obvious all along. Talent and ambition are not gendered. Opportunity, unfortunately, has been. The emphasis on creating laboratories, fellowships and incubation platforms where a young woman engineer from Kishtwar or Kupwara can see her idea become a market-ready product is particularly welcome. It moves the conversation from tokenism to genuine institutional support. It says to young women in rural Kashmir: your ideas matter, and we will build the pathways for them to succeed. Equally important is the caution that artificial intelligence and robotics must not remain confined to large land-holding farmers. With small and marginal farmers constituting nearly 86 per cent of India’s farming community, technology that does not reach them is technology that has failed. Tools must work on ordinary smartphones in low-bandwidth villages. Robotic instruments must be capable of being leased or collectively owned through Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs). The success of agricultural innovation, as the Lieutenant Governor rightly said, must not be measured by patents or papers but by whether a small farmer is genuinely better off. That is the test that matters. That is the standard we should hold ourselves to.