The paper explores the trajectory of defeminisation in Indian agriculture for over three decades based on NSSO and Labour Bureau data between 1983 and 2015. It concludes that withdrawals due to education and increased household incomes can only partially explain the trends.

The peri-urban areas are witnessing continually declining work participation amongst the poor, particularly women as extra-mural work such as fetching water restrains women from joining formal labour market.

Alienation from land and distress-driven shift towards agricultural wage work leave women particularly vulnerable. Although amended inheritance laws have increased the probability of daughters inheriting fathers’ land, women’s effective control over agricultural land, though relatively higher in the southern states, continues to remain abysmally low on an average in rural India.

Agricultural land converted to non-agricultural uses is often understood as ‘development’. While high growth, rich states have managed to hold on, the low growth poorer states have lost significant amounts of land under plough causing distress to their agricultural communities.

So much has been written to theorise place and space that it is often difficult to clearly distinguish among these concepts. This essay attempts to deconstruct the complex literature and is aimed at simplifying these geographical concepts.

Though there are some limitations of composite indices, they are an enabling tool for geographical regionalisation, a tool that is also becoming increasingly popular with policy makers. Development indices worked out using the human development index (HDI) and principal component analysis (PCA) have been compared in this article.

Quantitative methods in geography and its broad distinctions have been discussed in the ESSAY—with a focus on the mapping of geographical distribution.

Of India’s more than one billion people, about 68 per cent are directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture even today. Despite rapid technological interventions, about two thirds of India’s agricultural area remain rainfed and vulnerable to present day climate variability. The implications of climate change is yet not very clear, although scholars agree that global climate change will lead to greater unpredictability of weather conditions at local levels. This warrants serious deliberations on implications of climate change for agriculture in general and rural livelihoods in particular.