Access to Agri-production Resources and Decision Making: Gender Gap in Odisha

Agriculture remains as a prime source of women's livelihood and women remain as the backbone of agricultural workforce. In spite of women making up the prime workforce in agricultural production and processing in India, they lag well behind men in ownership of assets, access to agri-production resources and decision making. This paper explores the gender gap in access to agri-production resources and decision making in order to suggest strategies that can be useful in ensuring gender-equitable access to agri-production resources and decision making. A multistage, simple random sampling was used to select 80respondentscomprising 40 men and 40 women farmers from four villages covering two blocks of Khordha district in Odisha. The study reveals that men farmers predominate in accessing agri-production resources as compared with women. The chi square (p=0.0065) on difference between gender and access to agri-production resources affirms that it is strongly influenced by the gender. It is suggested that gender sensitisation, women education and land rights to women are to be prioritised in development initiatives to improve women's access to agri-production resources. There was wide variation in decision-making pattern among men and women related to crop and livestock production aspects. Six variables, namely, gender, education, land holding, gender of family head, family type, family size and access to production resources were significantly contributed towards variations in the decision-making pattern.