The government of India considers food security as a fundamental right. Hence, it has introduced schemes with a view to improving the conditions of access to food and nutrition. However, a project initiated in the rural areas of northeast India, Uttar Pradesh displays that gendered patterns in case of food distribution within the households often rest out of their chance to intervene because they are very deeply fixed within the local culture and tradition.
In rural areas, women solely manage the nutritional and other needs of their families while tending crops and other duties. Men often scruple to share domestic activities because they are in the age-old tendency to it as ‘women’s work’. Women play crucial role in ensuring the food security in their families even by neglecting their own nutritional needs. There is a tradition in rural culture that the male breadwinner eats first. Then, children, particularly sons, eat while women and girls last, by then there will be very little or no food left. Women get neither enough food nor are taken care of even during their pregnancy. As the family is based on the traditional culture women are even deprived of nutritious food and sufficient rest during sickness or pregnancy.