The increasing number of women in the agricultural field and other areas today can be stated as _______.
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → Women Empowerment
Note: The given answer is as per the official NTA Answer Key. However, Option (1) can also be considered correct, as explained below. NCERT calls this trend the ‘feminisation of agricultural labour force’ and presents it with women’s greater insecurity and lower wages; it does not call it empowerment, and women stepping into work outside the home can as well be read as their emancipation.
Option (1) Women Emancipation — Can also be considered correct. Emancipation means being set free from legal or social restrictions, as when reformers fought for the right of widows to remarry or of girls to go to school. Women coming out to work in the fields and in other areas, in growing numbers, is also a step towards their freedom from such restrictions, so this option too fits the question.
Option (2) Women Empowerment — Correct as per NTA. Empowerment means women gaining more power over their own lives: their own earnings, confidence and a say in decisions. Women in many villages now do most of the cultivation and are emerging as the main source of agricultural labour, and the growing presence of women in such work is described here as women’s empowerment.
Option (3) Women Orientation — Incorrect. Orientation means a direction or an attitude; it does not describe any change in the place of women in work.
Option (4) Women Reform — Incorrect. Reform is the change of laws and customs by reformers, as in the nineteenth-century campaigns against practices like purdah and child marriage. Women’s own growing share in work is not a reform movement.
NCERT (2025-26): “4.5 Circulation of Labour … The large scale circulation of labour has had several significant effects on rural society, in both the receiving and the supplying regions. For instance, in poor areas where male family members spend much of the year working outside of their villages, cultivation has become primarily a female task. Women are also emerging as the main source of agricultural labour, leading to the ‘feminisation of agricultural labour force.’ The insecurity of women is greater because they earn lower wages than men for similar work. Until recently, women were hardly visible in official statistics as earners and workers. While women toil on the land as landless labourers and as cultivators, the prevailing patrilineal kinship system, and other cultural practices that privilege male rights, largely exclude women from land ownership.” |