Empowering women in dairy cooperatives in Bihar and Telangana, India: a gender and caste analysis

Thanammal Ravichandran, Cathy Rozel Farnworth and Alessandra Galiè

No 338772, 2021 Annual Meeting, August 1-3, Austin, Texas from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: Dairy animals enable women to put food on the table and to earn money. India is a leading dairy economy with a vast number of milk producers organized into women-only and mixed-gender cooperatives. We use focus group discussions, interviews, and ethnography to analyze four dairy cooperatives in Bihar and Telangana and to investigate the effectiveness of these cooperatives in including women and in strengthening women’s control over dairy income. In three of the four cooperatives analyzed, gender and caste norms restrict women’s inclusion and limit their control over income. The fourth cooperative emerged from self-help groups and is part of a women-only dairy union. In this cooperative, we find women-only leadership, empowerment of women of all castes, and successful engagement of men as supporters. Our findings suggest that dairy cooperatives can be empowering for women when they emerge from women’s activism.

Keywords: Labor and Human Capital; Industrial Organization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/338772/files/JGAFS-612021-3-Paper.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea21:338772

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.338772

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2021 Annual Meeting, August 1-3, Austin, Texas from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().