Female Agricultural Workers' Wages, Male-Female Wage Differentials, and Agricultural Growth in a Developing Country, India

Abstract

The data on Indian agricultural wages for the period 1966-88 reveal a clearly rising trend in female agricultural wage workers' earnings in terms of both nominal and real wages. Because of the Green Revolution, agriculture in India also witnessed during this period phenomenal yield increases of major crops in several agricultural regions. Growth in agricultural output has been attributed largely to the adoption of biochemical technological innovations and expansion of irrigational facilities. The descriptive data on agricultural wages also reveal a few noticeable rural labor market phenomena particularly pertaining to female agricultural wage workers. First, the estimated all-India agricultural average daily real wage rates for male and female wage workers show that female workers' wages continue to be lower than male workers' wages (fig. 1), a trend that holds across the 16 states studied. Second, substantial cross-state differences continue to exist in the daily wage rates of female agricultural wage workers, ranging from as low as Rs 1.72 in Tamilnadu to Rs 4.77 in Punjab. Third, although the overall male-female earnings gap has declined over time (fig. 2), quite large differentials continue to exist across the major agricultural regions of the country. Fourth, and rather surprisingly, some of the regions with relatively high levels of yield and agricultural development are also characterized by a combination of relatively lower female agricultural workers' wages and higher male-female wage differentials than are the poorer states with comparatively low agricultural yields. For example, female agricultural wage workers earn, on the average, only 64% of male workers' wages in Tamilnadu, 67% in Maharashtra, 75% in Haryana, and 78% in Punjab; whereas in relatively