Agricultural Mechanization and Gendered Structural Transformation in India (With Kajal Gulati and Samuel S. Bird)

Abstract: Adoption of modern methods of mechanized tilling in India caused a dearth in women’s job opportunities in agriculture. While men were reabsorbed into the restructured agricultural sector or into non-agricultural jobs, women’s labor force participation in rural India fell. Using the staggered roll out of the national rural employment guarantee scheme (NREGS) we examine if the creation of jobs under the scheme mitigated the fall in women’s labor force outcomes due to the adoption of labor saving technology in agriculture. Instrumenting mechanization by the exogenous variation in the share of in the share of loamy soil and clayey soil across districts, we show that while the NREGS did slow down the fall in women’s weekly work days it was not sufficient to offset the effect of mechanization. At the extensive margin, NREGS was not successful at reducing the number of women exiting the labor force, though it had a positive effect on the intensive margin, number of days of work in a week. We surmise that if the NREGS was targeted to districts especially affected by gendered structural transformation, it could be more effective in stemming the fall in female labor outcomes in rural India.

Keywords: Structural transformation, agricultural mechanization, labor, gender, public policy, workfare programs, India

JEL Codes: J16, J21, J45, O13