WHEN you travel from Karachi into the interior of Sindh (a colloquialism for rural Sindh, or pretty much anywhere outside of Karachi or Hyderabad) the landscape immediately changes as soon as you cross the Indus River at Kotri.

Arid desert gives way to fertile farmland. At this time of year, cotton is being harvested, banana trees are budding, mango trees are unfruited and waiting for the next season’s provenance, sugar cane is tall and high, ready to be cut for the crushing season at the sugar mills.

This is some of the most productive farmland in all of Pakistan; its fertility has allowed Pakistan to become the second largest food donor in the world. It really feels like a land of abundance, blessed as in the words of Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai:

Saeein sadaaein karein mathe Sindh sukkar/Dost mithaa dildaar aalam sab aabad karein.

(Oh God! may ever You on Sindh bestow abundance rare; Beloved! All the world let share Thy grace, and fruitful be.)

Interestingly, it’s women doing much of the work in the fields. Their bright clothing — vibrant reds, pinks, blues, yellows that match the colours of neighbouring Rajasthan — dot the green and gold fields as they labour under the intense sun, bending, picking, gathering.

Women’s nimble fingers pull the cotton buds from the branches, women gather the blossoms in their laps, separating the soft buds from leaves and brambles, women lift bales of gathered cotton on their heads and walk with the grace of queens and the strength of men, as their children tag along behind them.

This isn’t to say that all the men aren’t working — they are, but not in the fields: some work in factories, others away in the larger cities, earning a more lucrative income than what farm work can provide them.

But it’s for certain that women aren’t staying at home either: economics dictates that they have to go out and work, and they do. And then, after a full day’s work in the fields, the women go home to prepare the evening meal, do their household chores, and then wake up before dawn to do it all over again.

These women are full participants in Pakistan’s agricultural economy, but their efforts don’t match their rewards. Men will make the arrangements with landowners to either work on a per-acre basis, or to sharecrop with the landowners and share profits.

But in either case, the haris’ female family members perform the same types of labour: gudh, or fine weeding between vegetables like onions; cotton-picking, or chundahi; wheat harvesting with a scythe, earning the same minimal amount of money whether they work under a per-acre or sharecropping arrangement.

According to recent reports, Pakistan’s finance ministry deems rural women the largest segment of productive workers in the country with 79pc of the women in agricultural regions of Pakistan working in agriculture, opposed to 60pc of the men.

Yet, according to Maha Mussadaq writing in the Express Tribune, Pakistan’s policymakers “ignore their contributions”. Rural women may work in the fields but “are never considered farmers”. And with less than 5pc of Pakistan’s women owning land, it’s hard to imagine that discrepancy ending anytime soon.

A conference held in Islamabad in late October on the theme of ‘Rural Woman: Development, Peace, and Pluralism’ saw women workers converge on the Lok Virsa museum in Islamabad to tell their stories, difficult ones of domestic violence, missing educational opportunities, and poor healthcare for both them and their children.

One of the main efforts of the conference was to educate the women about their rights, to urge them to register themselves for the local bodies elections and try to enact change at the government level.

Increased visibility of rural women in power positions finds an example in Rahila Bibi, who was last month elected the head of a farmers’ body in rural Sindh, near Mirpurkhas, in a grass-roots election supervised by the Sindh Irrigation and Drainage Authority.

Rahila Bibi’s new responsibilities include ensuring that the water of Bhaan Minor, a small tributary of the Indus, is distributed equally and fairly to all small farmers in the area, and recovering tax on which growers are defaulting. The change this small election represents is gigantic: a rural woman in a leadership position working side by side with male colleagues to represent small farmers is a revolution in itself.

No rural woman was more hopeful of change at a higher level than Veeru Kohli, the former bonded laborer who escaped with her entire family from the landlord who kept them imprisoned, and who then became an activist on behalf of bonded laborers still trapped in private jails.

Earlier this year, she contested the elections for a seat in the provincial assembly from Hyderabad under a manifesto of ending bonded labour. She was unsuccessful in her election campaign, and as a poor, uneducated woman from a minority group, perhaps she never really had a fighting chance.

But the fact that she did fight and aspired to win is another major revolution: proof that things can change: that patriarchy, even in Pakistan, is not set in stone.

Sindh, the province where Benazir Bhutto came from, has always been open to the idea of female leadership. A strong bias towards male leadership is, in actuality, offset by informal traditions of matriarchy in pockets and corners all over the province.

Now is the time for these women to exchange indirect power for direct power in the system. And with 31 women parliamentarians in the provincial assembly who can agitate on behalf of these women, the ground is fertile for rural women to assert their power as stakeholders in the agricultural system that gives Sindh so much of its abundance, and its grace.

The writer is an author.

Twitter: @binashah