Suggestions for Female Farmer's Areas of Gainful Employment - A Study of Rural Area of Sikkim in North-Eastern India

The researcher is a research scholar and the topic of the research is "Role of female labour in farming sector: a study of state of Sikkim". In the region despite majority of the population is dependent on agriculture sector, still it is in the evolving shape and poses a variety of challenges. The contribution of women in this noble sector is although enormous yet invisible and does not get counted for much. Social science research in the state of Sikkim is inadequate despite several incentives provided by the state government. Nowadays, with voluminous amount of public expenditure on women empowerment schemes, we cannot ignore this issue thus making it unavoidable to empower them also with the intention to fully utilize their caliber in this field. Keeping this in mind, the present study has analyzed the female farmer's views about opting for any entrepreneurial activity except agriculture to increase their income in the region by collecting data from 230 female farmers through interviews using a pre-designed schedule from 24 circles from all the four districts of Sikkim State. Based on their subjective judgments, female farmer's views have been measured and analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS). Some descriptive statistics, such as percentage as well as one sample t-test of inferential statistics is used to interpret the data. The findings of the study revealed that more number of sample female farmers on an average are interested in and hold the view of doing anything except agriculture and want to opt for any entrepreneurial activity.Poor socio-economic condition of the female farmers has also been observed. Therefore, in this paper the researcher has discussed some areas of gainful employment to improve the socio-economic condition of the stakeholders. Also the state has a target of converting it into a fully organic state by 2015. Therefore an attempt has been made in this article to overcome female farmer's problems to improve their socio-economic condition and to increase food security by presenting a flow diagram of Integrated Dry land Commercial Farming by Rainwater Harvesting, which can be proved beneficial to the farmers.