Work draws women’s bodies low to the earth, where repetition and strain gather slowly
Credit: Vasanth Kumar for Pexels
At dawn in Mustapally village in the Nalgonda district of Telangana, the soil still holds the memory of water. Moisture settles into the red loamy ground, softening it underfoot, shifting with each step. For Soundarya, 21, this is where the day begins. She walks into fields of chilli, jowar, and cotton, where every step meets a surface shaped by water.
In the dry months, the soil holds stones firmly, absorbing the force of movement. When the rains arrive, water loosens the ground and pushes those stones upward. The pressure of each step sharpens, often driving through rubber footwear into the sole. Walking becomes a constant adjustment between body, soil, and moisture.
For Lambada women in tandas, set apart from the main village, farming depends on attentiveness. It lies in knowing when to step lightly, when to hold back, and how to move without disturbing what is still growing. Even as land along National Highway 65 signals an urban future, agriculture continues to organise everyday life here.
Before tools, machines, or policy, there is the foot. It is the first point of contact between the farmer and the land. It absorbs water, weight, shock, and strain. Yet it remains the least protected.
Across India, agriculture continues to employ nearly half the workforce, with women forming over 40 per cent of it. Their labour does not arrive in intervals. It unfolds continuously, shaped by seasons and by water moving through soil.
While mechanised tasks such as ploughing or spraying appear from time to time, the work that sustains crops never really pauses. Weeding, transplanting, harvesting, and post-harvest handling keep women’s bodies close to the ground, moving through fields where water softens surfaces, shifts balance, and alters every step.
This labour rarely produces dramatic injury. Instead, it accumulates. Studies and Systematic reviews consistently show widespread musculoskeletal pain among agricultural workers. especially in the lower back, shaped by repetitive movement, bending, lifting, and sustained strain.
Yet walking across wet fields, standing for long hours, squatting, and carrying weight through the feet are treated as background activity rather than risk. Despite constant contact with soil, stone, and moisture, footwear remains inadequate. Most farmers rely on worn slippers or patched shoes, often replacing seven to eight pairs each year at a cost of ₹700 to ₹1000, none designed for environments shaped by water.
Bending, standing for long hours, and walking across wet fields are considered mere background activity rather than a risk to farmers' health.
This strain repeats across regions, each time shaped by how water moves through the land. In Bhalaut village in Haryana, Surender walks through saline chawwa soils where water rises underfoot, turning each step into an encounter with ground that yields and presses back. Jaidehi moves through harvested fields where water has receded but sharp stems remain embedded, making each step a careful negotiation. Panchshila, a forager from Akola, walks miles across forests, fields, and markets before setting up her stall near Dadar station in Mumbai.
Taken together, these are not isolated experiences. They form a running record of how contact and strain are built into everyday work. Media attention to blistered heels appears mainly during protest marches to cities, as in headlines such as “Blisters that should make India choke on its coffee.” The question is not whether harm exists, but why it remains unrecognised.
Farm workers’ feet rarely enter public discourse. Attention appears briefly during protest marches, when images of blistered heels circulate, then fade. One exception is photographer M. Palani Kumar’s photo essay for the People’s Archive of Rural India, which documents frayed slippers, punctured soles, and repaired rubber in Adivasi communities in Odisha. His images show footwear as a record of labour, memory, and survival.
To understand agriculture, the gaze must shift downward. At the level of the foot, where water meets soil, the story has always been present.
Before policy and infrastructure, there is the foot absorbing shock, damage, and survival in India’s agrarian and informal economies, its ubiquitous cracks bearing the imprint of everyday labour.
Where water lingers in soil, it also leaves the body more exposed. The consequences are rarely immediate, but they are never minor.
Dr Ramakrishna Prasad explains, “Cracked heels, puncture wounds, and open skin become entry points for infection.” In moisture laden conditions, these openings become pathways. Hookworm enters through the skin, contributing to chronic blood loss and anaemia. Fungal infections such as mycetoma, also known as madura mycosis, take hold in small breaks, causing swelling and long-term tissue damage. Water sustains crops, but it also creates the conditions in which disease travels quietly through the body.
These risks deepen with changing health patterns. Diabetes reduces sensation and slows healing, allowing minor wounds to worsen unnoticed. Snakebites remain a persistent hazard, especially in waterlogged fields where visibility is low. Prasad recalls his time as a house surgeon at the Kolar district hospital and describes patients arriving with the snake that had bitten them sealed in a bottle, hoping that identifying it would speed up treatment, a scene that recently resurfaced in a widely shared video of a man walking into Mathura district hospital. India records an estimated 58,000 snakebite deaths annually, most among poor and farm workers with limited access to timely care.
At this intersection of water, soil, and the body, footwear is not simply about comfort. It is preventive infrastructure. It determines whether a wound heals or deepens, whether strain becomes chronic pain, and whether a livelihood continues.
Yet this point of contact remains overlooked. Primary health systems respond late, after injury has progressed. Agricultural policy remains focused on yield and inputs. Design rarely recognises everyday farm work as a site of risk shaped by constant contact with water.
It is within this gap that three National Institute of Design alumni, Vidyadhar Bhandare, Santosh Kocherlakota, and Nakul Lathkar, founders of Earthen Tunes, began to ask a question that had long remained unspoken.
What does a shoe for farmers actually need to do?
The question emerges at the meeting point of body and wet ground, where water softens soil and exposes skin to strain, cuts, and infection. Yet this interface continues to slip through institutional attention.
Urban sandals are footwear worn by women farmers that are almost worn out.
Their search began with a seventeen-month journey across the Deccan in 2018. Moving through Marathwada and into the paddy fields of Tandur, they encountered landscapes where water filled the land and dictated movement. Farmers clapped as they crossed fields, hoping to alert snakes hidden in water.
They studied what farmers wore. Kolhapuris, urban sandals, PVC footwear, and disposable monsoon shoes were common. Most were not built for wet conditions, yet farmers depended on them, often replacing multiple pairs each year.
Testing revealed unexpected failures. In Kolhapur’s monsoon mud, football studs clogged with clay. “Santosh couldn’t walk more than five steps,” Vidyadhar recalls. The studs were clogged with clay until the shoe became impossible to lift. It wasn’t a failure of protection. It was a failure of movement.
Gumboots failed in similar ways. “First of all, they’re Wellington boots,” Santosh says. “They come up to your knees. To wear them properly, you need trousers tucked in. Have you ever seen farmers in India dressing like that?” Once water entered, it stayed trapped, making them heavy and impractical. Many remain unused in homes, training centres, and Krishi Vigyan Kendras. The insight was clear. A farming shoe cannot separate the body from the land. It must move with water.
One year, many pairs: footwear absorbing the costs of labour that bodies already bear.
After months of walking with farmers, sketching on site, and testing prototypes, a new design logic emerged from the field. The shoe had to respond to water rather than resist it. It needed to be light, flexible, breathable, and able to grip without trapping mud. It had to drain quickly and support constant movement.
Material became the central challenge. Leather was durable but heavy. PVC kept water out but trapped heat. Rubber held on to wet clay. Natural fibres seemed promising. The team worked with banana, jute, and cotton fibres at Dharamitra in Wardha; with coir at the Coir Research Institute in Alappuzha; and with screw pine and water hyacinth fibres through the Kottapuram Integrated Development Society. Each offered tensile strength and grip when wet. Most, once soaked, became heavier, dried too slowly, and failed the pace of agricultural work.
Designed for containment and separation, Wellington boots presume dry ground, upright posture, and standardised movement
An unexpected lead shifted the search. In Nagpur, the team heard of a woollen blanket used during the monsoon said to resist rain. The team dismissed it as folklore. But when they mentioned it to Mr Kanna Siripurapu at WASSAN (Watershed Support Services and Activities Network), he connected them to wool producers and weaving communities. In Navargaon, a village in the Gadchiroli district, they held a local woollen blanket called a 'Ghongadi/Kambli' under a running stream. No water passed through. This became a breakthrough and pointed towards indigenous wool.
Farmers work barefoot and ankle-deep, moving with water, mud, and uneven terrain.
Wool is not usually associated with the Deccan plateau, stretching across parts of Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Maharashtra. Across the Deccan, pastoral communities such as the Kuruma, Kuruba, and Dhangar sustain coarse indigenous wool known as 'dakhni oon'. Here, wool is not simply a material, but a practice shaped by movement across land and seasons.
Women spin fibres using tools whose origins were rarely named. Men weave the yarn on pit looms that move with migration. Entirely manual across warp and weft, each loom produced a single blanket over four or five days. Portable by design, the pit could be dug wherever the journey paused, allowing weaving to move with herds.
Spinning pastoral wool (right), Palsi is weaving the woollen fabric (left).
The blankets, called ghongadis, keep shepherds cool in dry heat and warm in rain, often pulled over the head during storms. As the Desi Oon Initiative notes, indigenous wool resists odour, regulates temperature, insulates, and breathes. It repels water on the surface while absorbing moisture within the fibre, wicking sweat and drying quickly. Its coarseness, often dismissed as a flaw, gives it durability, grip, and abrasion resistance, making it well suited to footwear worn without socks. It can hold nearly a third of its weight in moisture without feeling wet. This is why pastoral communities continue to wear wool in temperatures above 45 degrees, much as Bedouin groups do in the Sahara and Dhangars in the Thar. Ghongadis are further made water-resistant by brushing tamarind-kernel paste into the weave, tightening the structure so water runs off rather than soaking through.
Shoemaking in India carries caste histories, where leatherwork has long been assigned to Dalit communities, making the labour both essential and stigmatised. The team, Vidyadhar and Nakul, learnt shoemaking themselves, developing crochet-laced uppers and working with local self-help groups to build alternative pathways. What followed was not simply a technical exercise, but a process of translating material intelligence into form. What was once dismissed as coarse revealed itself as suited to fields shaped by water.
Many experiments with different fibres and wool came before the Earthen Tunes shoe.
Turning this into a product proved difficult. India’s footwear industry is built for scale, not for conditions shaped by water and uneven terrain. Workshops in Ambur, Mumbai, and Hyderabad declined unconventional materials. Early models failed in the field. Soles peeled. Stitching broke in mud. The lesson was immediate. The shoe had to be a single integrated form.
A manufacturer in Agra finally agreed to experiment. This allowed testing both in fields across the Deccan and at the Central Leather Research Institute using SATRA methods, which assess performance under repeated flexing and friction. Today, the shoes are used across eighteen states by nearly nine thousand farmers with a strong presence in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Maharashtra. The team runs a permanent stall at IIT Madras.
Yet the material economy behind them is fragile. Grazing lands are shrinking. Routes are disrupted. Markets such as Challakere, once central to wool trade, have declined sharply. Wool is not disappearing because it is irrelevant but because the landscapes that sustain it are vanishing.
Final prototype of the Earthen Tunes shoe called ‘Yaar’ for farmers.
Even as the shoes prove their value in wet and shifting terrain, new challenges emerge. One of the most urgent lies in protection against snakebites without compromising movement. As Santosh explains, increasing thickness to stop fangs would make the shoe too heavy and rigid for daily labour. “The problem is not simply one of material thickness.” It is structural.
The task is to disperse force, resist puncture, and still allow the body to move freely through water, soil, and uneven ground. Footwear must align with how farmers actually live and work, whether in sarees, salwars, or dhotis, without requiring adjustments that disrupt movement.
In this context, design becomes more than function. It becomes a way of working with fragile systems, where material, movement, and water remain closely tied.
Farmers who use these shoes describe a change that becomes visible over time in the way the body moves across land shaped by water. In Baramati, 29-year-old Swapnil Mhetre speaks of working across both dry fields and waterlogged land (जमीन) without the slipping or drag that usually comes with wet soil. The difference is not dramatic, but it holds through the day.
In paddy fields, where water gathers and mud holds the foot in place, Tanaji notes the shift more directly. “Of course, it takes an initial period to get used to wool against your feet, but then you see the muck latches on and dries off with ease, making walking amid the standing paddy harvest far less hazardous now with this footwear.” Movement, in such conditions, becomes less about pulling the foot free and more about maintaining balance as the ground changes.
For women like Savita, who spend long hours squatting and bending close to wet soil, the change is felt in posture and strain. The flexibility of the shoe allows the foot to adjust without tightening or slipping, while the wool lining gradually takes the shape of the foot. Over repeated movements such as planting and weeding, this reduces pressure in ways that remain consistent through the workday.
For Tanaji, the shoes make moving through wet paddy fields less hazardous.
Earthen Tunes distributes these shoes through a cross-subsidy model. Urban sales support rural access, often through partnerships with organisations such as the Desi Oon Collective. The approach works in practice, but it raises a larger question. Should protection at the point where the body meets wet soil depends on market arrangements or is treated as a basic condition of agricultural work?
On uneven ground, flexible footwear supports deep crouching and repetitive work better than rigid boots or bare feet.
The question is no longer whether farmers endure risk. It is why that risk remains unrecognised at the very point where it begins.
The story returns to the field, to the moment where water settles into soil and the foot meets it first. This is where agricultural work truly begins, not with yield or output, but with contact. The foot absorbs moisture, pressure, and strain long before anything is measured, carrying the quiet weight of labour through terrain shaped by water.
Water will always define agriculture. It nourishes crops, reshapes soil, and sustains livelihoods. But it also carries risk, entering through the smallest cracks in the skin, moving through bodies that are expected to endure without protection. What appears minor at the surface often deepens over time, travelling inward through repeated exposure.
One shoe cannot resolve the distance between labour, health, and policy. But it makes that distance visible. It reveals how much of agricultural work continues to rest on bodies that remain insufficiently supported, even as they sustain the system itself.
If agriculture is to be reimagined, it cannot begin with yield alone. It must begin where contact begins. At the foot. At the moment where water meets the body. Not as an afterthought, but as the first point where care, design, and policy meet everyday work. Because before every harvest, there is a step. And what that step carries should no longer remain unseen.