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Continuity and change in rural India by N Chandra Mohan

Village studies are a treasure trove of information on economic and social changes

A noteworthy feature of research on Indian agriculture is the resurgence of interest in village studies. Such studies – that include resurveys of villages studied earlier – provide insights into the livelihood prospects of the majority of people who continue to work in the countryside. They are an important mode of research to understand agrarian relations that often are an impediment to progressive change in rural India. Village studies have also been undertaken to study the changing nature of agriculture.

No discussion on village studies in India, however, is possible without a reference to the Slater villages. Gilbert Slater, who headed the department of economics in the University of Madras in 1915, sent his students to their villages to understand “the causes and remedies of Indian poverty”. Five of these villages in Tamil Nadu were resurveyed in 1936-37. Some were studied in 1961. S Guhan and his colleagues from the Madras Institute of Development Studies surveyed these five villages again in the early 1980s.

Thirty years later, one of these Slater villages, Iruvelpattu, was resurveyed, which means that there is valuable information for around a century on this particular village (See John Harriss, J Jeyaranjan, K Nagaraj “Land, Labour and Caste Politics in Rural Tamil Nadu in the 20th century: Iruvelpattu”, Economic and Political Weekly, July 31, 2010.) The surveyed villages are a treasure trove for researchers since they shed light on the economic and social changes that have taken place in that state.
The elements of continuity in Iruvelpattu’s story are that the built-up environment of the village in 2009 is not different from what was observed by Slater in 1915. It remains an agricultural village whose mainstay is paddy cultivation. The highway across the village still marks the boundary between the different worlds of the high and low castes. There is also the persistence of landlord power. The changes include dalit mobilisation and a tightening of the labour market that has brought about higher real wages.

In the spirit of the Slater village studies is the publication “Socio-economic surveys of three villages in Andhra Pradesh: A study of agrarian relations” by V K Ramachandran, Vikas Rawal and Madhura Swaminathan. One of these villages is Ananthavaram in coastal Andhra Pradesh that was surveyed in 1974. Thirty-two years later, land continues to be highly concentrated and landlessness is on the rise. Landlords remain dominant. The incidence of tenancy has increased with the terms getting more and more exploitative.

The methodologies of the other village studies currently being undertaken are vastly different. So, too, are the questions they are interested in. Consider, for instance, the study of Palanpur in Moradabad district of Uttar Pradesh presented by Himanshu of the Jawaharlal Nehru University at a recent workshop on policy options and investment priorities for accelerating agricultural productivity and development in India, organised by the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research and the Institute for Human Development.

Economists Christopher Bliss and Nicholas Stern selected Palanpur for their survey in 1974-75 since it was found suitable for analysing the impact of the Green Revolution. The seed-water-fertiliser-technology packages radically improved wheat yields in the region during the 1970s. In 1983-84, a team led by Jean Dreze and Naresh Sharma again collected data on this village. A smaller survey was done in 1993. However, a more detailed study followed in 2008-10 whose scope extended beyond agriculture.

An important feature of Palanpur is the absence of any dominant landlord farmer since it is essentially a smallholder village economy comprising a large number of small and medium peasants. Population pressure has led to a continued reduction in land holdings. There has also been a consolidation of non-farm employment opportunities inside as well as outside the village. Strikingly, agricultural labourers have more or less disappeared. The growing tenancy market has had to perforce adapt to this reality.

What makes for continuity is the role of technological change as a key driver of change in Palanpur. There has been a consolidation of machine-led technical change irrigation, ploughing and threshing operations. But the productivity gains from the Green Revolution have tapered off. Productivity increases in wheat cultivation – which still is the major crop – remain sluggish with yield growth of only 1.6 per cent every year. At the same time, agricultural wages in terms of wheat per kilogram have doubled over the last 25 years. Costs of cultivation have gone up, impacting profitability.

During the last 25 years, however, major changes have been witnessed in the way agriculture has been organised. Palanpur has responded to globalisation and liberalisation of the Indian economy through the widespread introduction of new cash crops like mentha since the early 1990s that is grown for peppermint oil and finds usage in toothpastes, mouthwash, body pain relievers and so on. The story of village India in these studies clearly is one of continuity amidst change. The renewed interest in such studies will certainly throw up many more such profiles to enable a deeper understanding of agrarian conditions in India.

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