A Note on Studying Non-Agricultural Activity in Rural India

Villages in India, as elsewhere, have traditionally been agricultural. The great majority of the population worked on the land or owned it. The bulk of the income of this majority came directly from crop cultivation. In an agrarian society that is also predominantly agricultural, and where hierarchies and social relations are mediated by caste, village services and service occupations are also closely tied to the agricultural and agrarian life of villages. Economic and social life were determined by agriculture and the relations of production in agriculture.

Agriculture and agriculture-related activities continue, of course, to be of fundamental importance to the economy and in the villages of India. There is no life without food and no food without agriculture. Nevertheless, the changing weight and significance of agriculture in the incomes and employment of rural households have profound implications for production relations and rural society.

The overwhelming dominance of the agricultural in the incomes and employment of households in rural India has declined significantly. While the pattern and extent of change vary greatly across rural India, the whole country can be said to have experienced this change in some significant way.

Household incomes — of the rural rich, the peasantry (and cultivators in general), and hired workers — derive, in different ways and magnitudes, from activities other than agriculture. The deployment of workers’ labour and employers’ supervision time is determined less by agriculture than in the past.

Although these shifts are widely recognised, systematic studies on how the growing weight of non-agricultural activities is reshaping the economic and social architecture of rural India are yet to be conducted. Detailed, survey-based databases that trace sources of income, employment patterns, and household strategies with precision can make an important contribution to our studies of non-agricultural activity in rural India. Such evidence can help us understand how non-agricultural activities are reinforcing or loosening traditional agrarian hierarchies, how they are altering class structure and employer-employee relations, and whether they enable more secure and diversified livelihoods or generate new vulnerabilities. By seeking truth through facts on these large questions, the research that we propose has the potential to advance our understanding of rural transformation in India significantly and to inform debates on the future of agrarian society.

I hope that scholars working in the field of agrarian studies and on socio-economic life in rural India (especially scholars associated with the Foundation for Agrarian Studies) will undertake studies of non-agricultural activity in rural India on the lines discussed in the foregoing paragraphs as part of future research.