It’s 10 in the morning and there are 15 people harvesting paddy in the field owned by Rabi Chaguthi at Shipadol VDC in Bhaktapur. A majority of the workers are women—some are gathering together paddy stalks in bunches and cutting their stems with sickles; others are spreading out the cut paddy to dry in the sun; and others are feeding sun-ripened stalks of hay to the threshing machine that separates the seeds from the hay.
All workers here—both men and women—do the same work, but when it is time to receive their wages, men are paid Rs 600 per day of work, while women get just Rs 250. Manisha Chaguthi, 36, one of these workers, knows all about the discrepancy. “We can’t do anything about it,” she says. “This is how things are here. I work as fast as any of the men here and carry the same amount of load that they do but unlike the men, we don’t shirk our duty and never show up to work reeking of
alcohol.” Samjhana Koirala, planning officer at the District Agriculture Development Office (DADO), has often heard this story. “It all comes down to locals’ unwillingness to shake off traditional practice regarding who should get paid how much,” she says. It is a belief that even women’s organisations have failed to change. “We have already formed 109 women groups to empower women financially in various VDCs in the district, but we haven’t been able bring about parity of pay between the genders.” The solution, according to Sapna Pradhan Malla, a lawyer and activist with the Forum for Women, Law and Development, should be simple enough—pay the workers not by gender but according to their output. It’s a scheme that could be implemented if only the land owners consented to the idea. “But it’s more profitable for owners to pay differential rates because they can employ more women for the same amount that would be used to pay the men,” Malla says. “That is, they will get more work done for less money.”
And this traditional pay system continues, despite the fact that women make up the backbone of the workforce in the field. According to the DADO, most of the daily wage labourers who work in the 4,348 hectares of the district’s paddy field are women. Rice farming is a major sector in Bhaktapur and most farmland in VDCs such as Katunje, Sipadol, Balkot, Sirutar, Udal, Tathali, Changunarayan and Bageswori are used for cultivating the grain.
Women workers can’t take legal recourse because they work in the informal sector. “There is an Act related to wage equality between genders in the Interim Constitution, and it has been implemented to some extent. But, in the informal sector, which is where these women work, there is no mechanism to implement the law,” Malla says.
Anup Ojha is a reporter for The Kathmandu Post primarily covering social issues, crime, and human interest stories since 2011. Before moving to the social beat, Ojha covered arts and culture for the Post for four years.
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