In the recent assembly elections, we were once again inundated with information about how much of a difference the women’s vote made to the outcome.

It was the tragic death by suicide that has laid bare the daily trauma of the three sisters from a landless household married to an affluent family with demands for dowry from impoverished parents.

The theoretical framework of this paper takes into an account the relationship between women’s work in subsistence agriculture and the rural development strategies, both at the local and national levels.

It is by now almost an axiom with demographers, labour economists and economic historians th

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Narayani