When India talks about its agricultural transformation, it speaks of technology, data, and scale. What it rarely speaks of, but should, is the woman in the field. She forms the backbone of Indian agriculture. The fastest-growing wave of agri-tech is racing past her.
The numbers leave little room for ambiguity. The latest data from the Periodic Labour Force Survey report shows that 20 crore women are now employed in India, with rural female workforce participation crossing 39% — more than double what it was seven years ago. Of these, nearly 70% work in agriculture. In states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the share rises to over 80%. India's farms are becoming visibly more female, almost entirely on the back of rural women re-entering work.
And yet, the parallel revolution in agri-tech — the country now hosts over 2,800 agri-tech ventures, and the Union Budget 2026-27 has put serious capital behind the sector — is being built largely without her in the room.
Consider the digital baseline. The most recent National Family Health Survey shows women's internet use has nearly doubled to 64.3% nationally. But for rural women — who are also the farmers — it stands at only 58.6%. Just 57.4% of rural women own a mobile phone they personally use.
{{/usCountry}}Consider the digital baseline. The most recent National Family Health Survey shows women's internet use has nearly doubled to 64.3% nationally. But for rural women — who are also the farmers — it stands at only 58.6%. Just 57.4% of rural women own a mobile phone they personally use.
{{/usCountry}}The GSMA Mobile Gender Gap Report 2026 records real progress: in India, women's mobile internet use rose from 39% to 49% in just a year. But the gap remains the widest in South Asia and one of the widest in the world; the gender gap narrowed from 33% to 25%. In rural India, it stretches to nearly 30%. Even when she owns a phone, control over it is often not hers. It travels with the husband to the market. It is shared across the household. It is unavailable in the exact moment she needs an answer — when a leaf curls, when rain fails, when a pest spreads.
It would be easy to read this as a problem of devices and infrastructure. It is not, or at least, not only. The deeper problem is that agri-tech in India has been designed, by and large, around an average farmer who is implicitly male: Literate, with his own phone, and the authority to act on what it tells him. The woman who actually works the field becomes an afterthought. And an afterthought, multiplied across millions of farms, becomes structural exclusion.
The consequences are no longer abstract. The FAO's landmark 2024 study, The Unjust Climate — analysing 100,000 rural households across 24 low- and middle-income countries — found that a 1°C rise in average temperature reduces women farmers' incomes 34% more than men's. Female-managed farms already produce 24% less yield than male-managed farms of the same size--purely from unequal access to inputs and information.
The World Economic Forum’s 2024 agritech report is blunt about what is at stake: closing the gender gap in agriculture could boost farm outputs by 20–30%. That is not a welfare argument. It is an economic one. Despite comprising nearly half of the workforce across commercial value chains like cotton, sugarcane, tea, coffee, and cashews, women earn up to 60% less than men.
India’s Agriculture Census tells the other half of the story: these women hold title over just 13-14% of agricultural land. Without land titles in their names, they are also invisible to PM-KISAN, Kisan Credit Cards, and crop insurance databases — the very digital infrastructure meant to serve farmers. Land ownership unlocks access to formal credit, input subsidies, and extension services; without it, the digital transformation arrives at her doorstep already locked.
The encouraging news is that India is investing heavily in closing this gap. The Government of India's Bharat-VISTAAR, a multilingual AI-powered platform that integrates AgriStack with ICAR practices, now offers personalised guidance through voice, chat, and mobile in farmers' own languages. Maharashtra's MahaVISTAAR-AI has already reached around 25 lakh farmers. Civil society and private-sector tools, including FarmerChat, are showing that voice-first, multilingual, image-based interfaces can finally meet women farmers where they are.
The lessons are consistent. The agri-tech ecosystem must move away from text-heavy advisories toward image, video, and voice-based content that requires no literacy and assumes no prior digital skills. The 2025 GroupM-Kantar report shows that adoption of YouTube, WhatsApp, and Facebook is already high in rural India, particularly among 18–24-year-olds. An IPSOS study commissioned by Meta found that 94% of rural users consume video daily on Meta platforms — proof that the old assumption of rural resistance to technology no longer holds. The barrier is not appetite. It is design.
Two further shifts will determine whether agri-tech finally serves the woman in the field. First, advisory must become two-way — built around interactive systems where farmers can ask questions and receive timely answers in their own dialects, rather than one-way broadcasts that disappear into the noise. Second, women must enter the rooms where these systems are designed — as engineers, as agronomists, as trusted intermediaries like extension workers and self-help groups, and as decision-makers in policy.
India's agri-tech moment will be judged less by its sophistication and more by whom it includes. The woman in the field has always been the backbone of Indian agriculture. The question now is whether the technologies of the next decade will be built with her — or simply around her, and at her cost.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Nidhi Bhasin, CEO, Digital Green India.