In India also, the predominance of females in shifting agriculture, the traditional occupation of tribals in many parts of the country, was noticed in the past. For example, P.C. Kar found that among the Garos, a shifting cultivator tribe by tradition from Meghalaya, even today, the ratio of female to male investment in labour in this form of agriculture is 136:100 days per year. According to Varrier Elwin, in the Naga villages in the past, the woman’s life was arduous. With most of the menfolk among them organized for war, there fell on her the heavy burden of work in the jhum fields on the steep slopes of hills, often at a long distance from her home. Similarly, a study of the Saoras by Menon has shown that even today, except for the initial sowing which requires primarily men do intensive labour input in which, women predominate in all other activities connected with swidden agriculture, the traditional economic activity of this tribe. So, it seems that the categorization of slash and burn agriculture as it was traditionally practised in the past as a female farming system has validity in India also and is not confined to Africa alone.

In hunting and food gathering societies also, the categorization of man-the-hunter and woman-the-gatherer is well known. It is also known that continued and sustained food supply in hunter-gatherer societies came from gatherers and not from hunters. In addition, in this society, food processing was entirely an activity of women. This goes to show that the traditional hunting-gathering economy of the tribals was also women-centered. For example, among the Birhor of Chotanagpur, a wandering tribe who combined hunting and gathering with specialization in rope making as a means of subsistence, women played a very important role in the economy. Both men and women went out hunting and trapped small animals together. The collection of roots, tubers, mahua flowers and fruits, the staple food of the Birhor during the lean season, was entirely the women’s job. Girls collected date palm leaves, which were woven into mats by women and bartered by the Birhors in the nearby villages for the clothes that they wore. Both men and women joined hands in processing grass and making rope and bartering them in nearby villages.

In spite of their dominant role in the traditional tribal economy, women did not necessarily enjoy a high status in the traditional tribal society though bride price was paid for them and the dowry system was totally unknown among them partly because of their role in the production process. In some tribes, elderly women achieved the status of leaders of their groups for all practical purposes on account of their sound economic position. However, this happened rarely and by and large, women seldom enjoyed political and / or economic power in traditional tribal societies despite the important role they played in the economy. Though women worked hard in the traditional tribal economy, more often than not, they were excluded from decision-making in economic matters. A relationship of asymmetry wherein males and females had equal access to the means of production like communally owned forest land for hunting and gathering and / or shifting cultivation but not necessarily to decision making regarding their use pattern or the disposal of the output produced and to status may be argued to have existed among tribals in the past despite the fact that in many cases, women played a dominant role in the economy.

Things changed for the worse for tribal women with commercialization, which was brought about mainly as a result of colonialism. Tribal women were even denied access to the means of production under the new dispensation. Colonialism brought about a change in the role of women in the African economies when settled agriculture, which may be defined as man’s work was introduced on a large scale in those parts of the continent where Swidden agriculture was traditionally practised. In shifting cultivation, land was communally owned and both men and women had access to it. When settled cultivation was introduced in these areas, plain lands for carrying on settled agriculture and inputs were distributed to tribal males on the wrong assumption that women are non-workers.

In India also, the introduction of settled agriculture among the tribals during British rule and also in independent India marginalized women, denying them access to productive resources. The introduction of settled agriculture in place of the traditional economic activities of tribals paved the way for this change. In comparison with slash and burn cultivation, settled agriculture is a male-dominated agricultural system. In India also, communal land ownership of the tribal economy was replaced by private land ownership under settled agriculture with land belonging exclusively to males and handed down through the male line, sidelining women totally. Men among the tribal peasantry practising settled agriculture also exercise control over land for settled cultivation. Except among the matrilineal tribes of north-east India, tribal women are debarred from owing land for settled cultivation by customary law. Even among the matrilineal tribes of the north-east where land for settled cultivation is owned the actual control and management of land or transactions with respect to land are left to the maternal uncle. Afforestation schemes were taken up in a big way in colonial of also in post-independence India, laying emphasis on commercial species, which could be exploited, for profit. In areas where these schemes were taken up, tribal women were denied access to forest lands for carrying on shifting cultivation and were denied the right of collecting fuel, fodder and minor forest produce from forests which were commercially exploited.

According to Mias, deliberate and conscious decisions were taken in many colonies of Africa to displace women’s labour, leading to a process of housewification of women, which was the declared ideal for a civilized nation. In India also, once settled cultivation replaced traditional shifting cultivation among tribals, women were debarred from doing certain types of agricultural operations whereas in swidden agriculture, they worked alongside with the menfolk, avoiding only those activities which required physical strength. For instance, the Ho women are not allowed to touch the plough and tribal women in a settled cultivation based milieu consider ploughing, sowing or in some cases, harvesting, inaccessible to them.

However, in India as in the rest of the tribal world, except for the housewification of tribal women belonging to better off households, the introduction of settled agriculture among tribals has not reduced the burden of work on tribal women. They have had to take on arduous and unpleasant jobs in settled agriculture like planting and weeding that are considered to be women’s work and are not done by men. Not only are these jobs unpleasant and arduous, women have to spend long hours at them and the wages for these for agricultural operations that are carried on by males. Not only that, because of the incomplete transformation of the traditional tribal economy, tribal women of India carry a double burden of work, carrying on shifting cultivation on the side along with working as landless agricultural labourers in settled agriculture with little or no help from the men who take up settled agriculture on a whole-time basis or work in mines plantations and in urban areas when their traditional economic activities cannot sustain them any longer and they have to leave home in search of jobs in non-traditional activities. In the absence of their men and the labour that they put in the jhum fields, the women have to put in more time and effort into shifting cultivation than they did in the past. They have to put in more effort into shifting agriculture also because the encroachment of forests and the deforestation caused by development reduces land availability for jhuming and it requires more labour intensive techniques to be adopted in jhuming to make the smaller land mass available for jhuming yield the same amount of output. Deforestation or reservation of forests also makes them work harder and walk longer distances to collect food, fuel and fodder from interior forest areas which are not reserved or have not been denuded.

If they are able to break away from the agricultural sector and get work in the industrial or tertiary sector, the tribal women of India today are usually absorbed in the informal sector and are victims of both economic and sexual exploitation in their new occupations. They lack the education and skills necessary to take advantage of the new economic opportunities, which open up, for earning a living with economic development. Reservation for tribals in government jobs hardly changes the situation for the bulk of the tribal women as only richer, more educated and privileged tribal women gain from the policy of reservation if they do work and do not suffer from the housewification syndrome.

This tendency of tribal women being shortchanged by development is going to be aggravated when the wind of liberalization sweeps the hills and forests where the tribals traditionally live. Tribal women will have to bear a heavier burden because the lands on which jhum cultivation and other traditional tribal occupations were practised will be encroached by multinationals for growing commercial crops. As commercialized agriculture will be largely mechanized and will required skilled workers, the tribal women will lose their jobs as unskilled agricultural labourers. The new opportunities opened up by liberalization in the industrial and the tertiary sectors will evade them because of their lack of education and skill. At the same time, the economic burden on them will increase because they will also have to support their entire families including the men who will be thrown out of employment from their nontraditional jobs and dispossessed of their small and marginal farms by liberalization.