Agrarian Change in India
Contents: Introduction/Surinder S. Jodhka. I. Conceptual Frames. 1. A Post-Marxian Theory of Peasant Economy: The School of A. V. Chayanov/Daniel Thorner. 2. The Agrarian Question in the Twenty-first Century/Sam Moyo, Praveen Jha and Paris Yeros. 3. Gandhi and Agrarian Classes/Abha Pandya. II. Holding Size and Land Reforms. 4. Trends in Land Relations: A Note/Pranab Bardhan. 5. Abolition of Landlordism in Kerala: A Redistribution of Privilege/Ronald J. Herring. 6. Changing Land Relations in Punjab and Implications for Land Reforms/Sucha Singh Gill. 7. Ownership Holdings of Land in Rural India: Putting the Record Straight/Vikas Rawal. III. The Green Revolution and Market Edifice. 8. India’s Green Revolution and Beyond: Visioning Agrarian Futures on Selective Readings of Agrarian Pasts/Richa Kumar. 9. Development Policies and Agricultural Markets/Ramesh Chand. 10. States of Wheat: The Changing Dynamics of Public Procurement in Madhya Pradesh/Mekhala Krishnamurthy. IV. Relational Structures and Transitions. 11. Relations of Production in Pre-colonial India/Sumita Chatterjee and Ashok Rudra. 12. Semi-feudalism or Capitalism?: Contemporary Debate on Classes and Modes of Production in India/Alice Thorner. 13. New Relations of Production in Haryana Agriculture/Sheila Bhalla. 14. Agricultural Labourers, the State and Agrarian Transition in Uttar Pradesh/Jens Lerche. 15. De-feminisation of Agricultural Wage Labour in Jalpaiguri, West Bengal/Loes Schenk-Sandbergen. 16. Land Distribution among Scheduled Castes and Tribes/B. B. Mohanty. 17. Social Profile of Agricultural Entrepreneurs: Economic Behaviour and Lifestyle of Middle-Large Farmers in Central Gujarat/Mario Rutten. 18. The Farmer-capitalists of Coastal Andhra Pradesh/Carol Boyack Upadhya. 19. Inclusive Development?: Migration, Governance and Social Change in Rural Bihar/Gerry Rogers and Janine Rogers. V. Emergent Agrarians. 20. Agrarian Distress in Bidar: Market, State and Suicides/A. R. Vasavi. 21. Farmers’ Suicides and Response of Public Policy: Evidence, Diagnosis and Alternatives from Punjab/Anita Gill and Lakhwinder Singh. 22. Resurrecting Scholarship on Agrarian Transformations/Alpa Shah and Barbara Harriss-White. 23. Agrarian Changes in the Times of (Neoliberal) ‘Crises’: Revisiting Attached Labour in Haryana/Surinder S. Jodhka.
Despite its steady growth during the post-Independence period, agriculture in India has been progressively shrinking in terms of its contribution to the national income. However, it continues to provide a source of livelihood and employment to a large proportion of Indians. Its social worth even in 21st-century India remains far greater than its economic value. Given its demographic and social weight, it remains crucial for policy makers.
Further, in countries like India and the larger universe of the Global South, agrarian economies function within a variety of complex relational structures, shaped by local histories and the broader processes of their political economies. Thus, the question of agrarian change is as much about social transformation as it is about economic growth. India presents a fascinating example of such a process. Despite a common political history, trajectories of agrarian change vary widely across regions of the country. Social science scholarship on the subject has also been extremely rich and varied.
Changes in India’s economic paradigm in the early 1990s shifted the state’s focus away from agriculture, leaving it largely to the vagaries of the market. This posed a huge challenge for the agricultural sector, particularly for those with small and marginal holdings. The accelerated integration of agriculture with the national and global markets, prompted by the introduction of newer technologies, has also been the source of a social and cultural fragmentation of rural life, a weakening of kinship ties and produced a general crisis of its economy.
This volume is a selection of seminal readings, published in the Economic and Political Weekly by some of the leading scholars of the field. They present extensive and in-depth research on agrarian economy, its social structures and their transformations over the past century. The book is an invaluable resource for students, teachers, researchers and policy actors, as also readers who wish to understand the fascinating and complex dynamics of the Indian agrarian scene and its contemporary history.
