Gold dots the fields of Kakar Khateri in Uttarakhand’s Champawat district, nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas. There are specks of green as well, but when the wheat crop matures in a few days, the terraced fields of this region will resemble a vast sheet of gold.I can’t explain how beautiful it is. It is a sight I never tire of. It washes away all my exhaustion,” says Chandrakala Tamta, a 30-year-old villager, standing at a point overlooking the village’s fields. Tamta’s delight comes not merely from the scenery. It comes out of a sense of satisfaction at seeing the payback from the days of back-breaking work that she put into cultivating the crop

Tamta and many other women like her share in the joy of a bountiful harvest in Uttarakhand, where women shoulder the bulk of the responsibility for cultivation. Women perform all the farming tasks here, save for sowing and ploughing.

“From chopping wood for firewood to fodder collection for cattle to irrigation, laying of manure or reaping or any form of tillage, everything is done by us,” she says. “Everything is done by hand, there are no machines. In Uttarakhand, the woman is the machine,” she says.

Farming in the hill state has always been the preserve of women. In fact, it was women who were at the forefront of the famous Chipko (hug the trees) movement in the 1970s to protest against extensive deforestation that threatened to wreck the ecological balance of the region.