Transforming Agriculture and Tea Garden: The Impact on Farm Women Engagement

Aims: To study the relationship between the women farmers' engagement in the transformed tea gardens from conventional farming practices with various socio-economic exogenous variables, their socio-economic condition, economic vulnerability, and empowerment.

Study Design: The locale was selected by the purposive sampling technique and the respondents following such transformation in their farming practices are selected by the random sampling method.

Place and Duration of Study: The study was carried out during the year of 2018-19. The place, three blocks namely Falakata Block, Madarihat Block, and Alipurduar-1 of Alipurduar District of West Bengal of India were selected for the study.

Methodology: In this present study sixty respondents following such transformation in their farming practices have been selected by both purposive and random sampling techniques to study the farm women's engagement in transformed tea gardens as the consequent character in terms of various exogenous variables. Then the numerical data is collected, passed through the data normalization process, and then put them into multivariate analysis. The gathered data had been put into multivariate analysis (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences V20.0 (SPSS) of IBM and OPSTAT were used for analyzing the Coefficient of Correlation, Stepwise Regression, and Path Analysis).

Results: The study reveals that the mean change in land under cultivation (x6), mean change in average garden size (x7), mean change in total income (x8) and ratio of pesticides use (x10) variables have been found to exert strong and determining the contribution to this transformational process.

Conclusion: The study had revealed the emergence of small tea gardens help in the empowerment of the women as well as increasing the demand of women labours in the transformed farming sector, which improve the overall status of the tea garden workers.