Bt (Bacilluss thuringensis) cotton is associated with a substantial overall generation of rural employment. This has interesting gender implications. Cotton is a labour intensive crop. Unlike in other countries cotton farming is not highly mechanized. Cotton is manually picked in the State. The living standards of rural people will be affected by the performance of cotton cultivation, which is matter of serious concern. With this back drop, the present study is proposed to examine the labour use pattern in Bt cotton cultivation in Andhra Pradesh state of India during 2007–08 The study used Multi-stage stratified random sampling method to select the respondents from among the farm households. Data regarding gender wise hired labour participation, family labour contribution, farm practices in Bt and Non Bt cotton cultivation and perceptions about farming were collected. A positive relationship is found between labour use and farm size. The fact of preponderance of marginal and small farmers is crucial for any understanding or assessment of the farmers’ condition. Dependence of wage labour is high among marginal and small farmers. 10 per cent of the marginal farmers and 7 per cent of the small farmers have reported that they derive their main income from agricultural wage labour. When it comes to subsidiary occupation the percentages were 54 and 44 for these two categories of the farmers. A small proportion of medium farmers too are dependent on wage labour either as main occupation or subsidiary occupation. Marginal and small farmers work on their fields and also work as hired labouers. We don't find a dichotomy between owner and labourer in these households. Things have changed for the large landowners too, unlike in the olden days when women of dominant peasant communities from large holdings did not go to the fields to work or to supervise work. The system of permanent labourers which was prevalent some decades ago has almost disappeared. There are hardly any permanent labourers or bonded labourers in cotton cultivation in AP villages now. Wages for agricultural labouers vary from season to season. They also vary from men to women. The disparities in wages between men and women could be due to the diffent kinds of works they do. Generally there is a gender divisioin of labour. When men and women parcipate in the same work such as cotton picking both are paid the same wages. In Bt cotton cultivation labor requirements for pest control decrease, more labor is employed for harvesting. Based on perceptions of the farmers it can be concluded that through Bt technology labour use efficiency, employment opportunities has increased and returns to labor improve remarkably. And ultimately it reduces the disguised unemployment in agriculture. The aggregation of labour use pattern shows that females earn much more from Bt cotton than males. This is due to the fact that cotton harvesting is largely carried out by hired female laborers, whose employment opportunities and returns to labor improve remarkably. Pest control, on the other hand, is often the responsibility of male family members, so that Bt technology reduces their employment in cotton production. The increase in employment due to Bt cultivation is also shared by family labour. It could be concluded that the elasticity of employment is found to be high among Medium and Semi Medium farming categories and lower in Marginal and Small categories. The new BT technology is a big gain for the rural economy as a whole, since the rural employment growth has been the biggest concern in the state in the past decade. However, the saved family labor can be reemployed efficiently in alternative agricultural and non-agricultural activities, so that also for males the overall returns to labor increase. And also, they have noticed that the implementation of Government employment programmes should be implemented based on agro climatic conditions in the state and crop status.
Bt cotton and Non-Bt cotton, employment elasticity, Hired labour and family labour, Size of holding
