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Paper short abstract

This paper challenges techno-centric agricultural development by showing that gender inequality operates through market structures, not access gaps. Women farmers in India face 40 to 60 percent higher costs due to credit discrimination and gendered labour markets, barriers no technology can bridge.

Paper long abstract

Digital agricultural technologies and climate-smart interventions are widely promoted as pathways to inclusive and resilient food systems. Yet such techno-centric approaches rest on the assumption that gender inequality in agriculture arises primarily from access gaps that technology can bridge. This paper challenges this assumption by demonstrating that gender inequality is produced through market structures that technology alone cannot overcome.

Drawing on qualitative research with 32 women-headed farming households across three districts in Telangana, India, I document how women cultivators face production costs 40-60 percent higher than male-headed households farming equivalent land. This differential arises not from technological limitations but from structural discrimination: credit markets that exclude women without land titles, forcing reliance on informal lenders charging 36-50 percent interest compared to 7-12 percent from institutional sources; input dealers who exploit women's perceived lack of agricultural knowledge; and labour markets that require women to hire male workers for tasks culturally designated as masculine. These gendered cost structures persist regardless of the adoption of technology.

The findings reveal fundamental limits to techno-centric development paradigms. Even when equipped with digital tools, weather information, and improved seeds, women farmers remain uncompetitive as long as structural inequalities in access to markets and the cost of capital persist. The paper concludes that food security agendas must move beyond a focus on technology dissemination to address and transform the gendered relations that shape agricultural factor markets, including credit systems, input supply chains, and labour arrangements, as prerequisites for building genuinely inclusive agrarian futures.