Women, New Technology and Development: Changing Nature of Gender Relations in Rural India

"This book examines the broad social processes brought about by the introduction of modern agricultural technology and thereby locates the changing role and status of women within these given processes. Based on indepth empirical data it shows how new technology has contributed to the growing regional disparity and sharpening of class inequality. It also brings out the new dimensions of marginalisation of women in terms of increasing work burden, segregation and immurement in the upper strata, on the one hand, and low wage, economic insecurity, gender based wage discrimination, casualisation in the work force and class based exploitation in the lower strata, on the other. The study establishes that new technology has strengthened the base of patriarchy through caste ideology that helps perpetuate gender subordination and gender role stereotyping. It also emerges from the study that persisting agricultural backwardness, growing deforestation and the rural-urban continuum have adverse effect on the traditional tribal institutions resulting in an increase in poverty, seasonal out migration, economic insecurity, exploitation and the drudgery of the tribal women."