Impact of Migration on Women Empowerment: A Situational Analysis of North-Bihar

The study was conducted during 2018-2019 to explore the impact of male migration innorth-Bihar in empowering women in different domain of household decisions. Five domainsnamely agricultural production, asset creation, health care, educational decision of childrenand leadership were considered and women empowerment indices were computed for eachdomain. The result revealed that migration of male member adequately empowered only29.44 per cent of women. Larger proportion of women respondents (43.89%) were foundunder moderately empowered category and 29.67 per cent were observed still under lowempowerment group. Women were adequately empowered in studied area to take decisionsrelated to health care, education and agricultural production. The decision to purchase andsale of assets still was under the jurisdiction of male counterpart as the patriarchal systemstill dominated. The role of women in decision making in all the farm activities, fromselection of crops to the sale of farm produce, showed comparatively more moderateempowerment indices. The paper concludes that the women are empowered to varyingextent in situation of male migration from their native places.

Labour out-migration and Covid-19 Pandemic in India: A case study of Murshidabad district of West Bengal

This article outlines the patterns of internal migration from Murshidabad district of West Bengal during the Covid-19 Pandemic. We found that seasonal/temporary male migration from the study area has been evolving continuously over time. More than half of the total migrants move within the state boundaries. The inter-state migrants are often destined to economically better off states than the study area. We have shown that landlessness, lack of jobs, low wages, decaying of traditional craftsmanship and household pressure are among the factors leading young males to migrate. These moves are motivated by jobs and income, and movers often shift from agricultural work to building and construction and petty businesses. Migrants and their families are almost exclusively dependent on domestic remittances to meet the household expenditures, repay loans and meet children’s educational expenses. Social networks, especially friends and relatives, are crucial in facilitating the migration process. Covid-19 Pandemic raised essential questions about the future of these vulnerable sections of the population as migration became difficult and remittances dropped significantly.

Measuring Migration Status Based on the Place of Marriage Overestimates the Share of Male Migrants in Historical Populations. Evidence From Dutch Marriage Certificates

Thanks to the construction of large databases such as LINKS and GENLIAS based on Dutch civil certificates, our knowledge of individual demographic behavior in the past has improved significantly. However, the use of such research infrastructures also introduces some potential pitfalls, as these databases do not contain all information available from the original sources. For instance, variables that are available on the original source but lacking in LINKS are the places of residence of the bride and the groom at marriage. A common practice among researchers using LINKS and GENLIAS is therefore to identify migrants by comparing an individual’s birth place with the place of marriage. The place of marriage, however, is not necessarily identical to the place of residence, because couples traditionally contracted their marriage in the bride's or bride's parents' municipality of residence. It is therefore particularly likely that grooms are erroneously considered as migrants even though they had never moved before marriage. In this paper we explore whether this poses a problem to studies using the place of marriage as an equivalent to the place of residence. This will be achieved with the help of the marriage certificates release from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN), which, unlike LINKS, contains both the place of marriage of the couple and the residence of the bride and groom, and allows us to compare the findings derived from both approaches. The analyses show that identifying migrants based on place of marriage causes indeed a significant overestimation of male migrants, but not of female migrants. We therefore suggest the use of a couple's place of first childbirth as a robustness check to avoid overestimating male migration in the past.

International migration and the gender wage gap

This article analyzes the effect of international migration on the wage gap between women and men who remain in Mexico. We use historical distance to the U.S. border over early twentieth-century railroad networks as an exogenous factor causing changes in the relative supply of men and women, due to predominately male migration. A 10% decrease in the relative labor supply of men tends to increase the wage gap between women and men by approximately 1.1 percentage points, suggesting that they are not perfect substitutes. However, the results imply a greater elasticity of substitution between men and women than that suggested by previous studies.

Knowledge Management by Women for Climate Change Adaptation in Agriculture

Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change. Changes in rainfall pattern and intensity of extreme events are evident. Due to the male migration caused by climate change and development drive there occurs huge feminization in agriculture. The perception and impact of climate change is completely gender differentiated; women are seemed to be disproportionately affected by climate change. Moreover, to cope with the climate change the community is now cultivating new crops and varieties. Besides, they are using different new cultivation methods and techniques to adapt with climate change. For newly introduced crops the traditional knowledge is not sufficient. Use of mobile phones for knowledge and information sharing in agriculture is gaining popularity among farmers. Growing interest on climate change adaptive agriculture among the female farmers and easy availability of mobile phones and network service created an opportunity of knowledge management on adaptive agriculture. The mobile phone use efficiency and ICT self-efficacy among the rural women are significant. The decisionmaking capacity of women is limited and there are number of challenges though the farming responsibility is gradually shifting towards them. The study was conducted in the Charland of Nilphamari District of Bangladesh from June 2017 to December 2019 to know the scopes and requirements of adaptation knowledge management in agriculture. Res. Agric., Livest. Fish.7(2): 225-233, August 2020

Women’s Labour and Sustainable Agriculture

This article looks at the participation of women in irrigated agriculture in 32 districts of Tamil Nadu and found exceptional involvement in these three districts, which are topographically different from each other, namely Kanyakumari, Nilgiris and South Arcot. The study asked—how does contemporary agriculture support female participation and in turn how does this keep agricultural labour supply and food security sustainable? A range of research methods were used to explore the rationale for exceptional female participation in irrigated agriculture. It concluded that such participation arises because of the existing pattern of labour supply primarily by landowning farm women and labourers. This as a result of male preference for widespread skilled jobs, subsequent changing labour pattern due to male migration, matrilineal property ownership, cropping intensity, multi-tasking of women and the coordinated effort of women’s groups (SHGs) in accessing micro-credits. Finally, subsidies and incentives have further altered and effected greater labour supply of women in agriculture.