Full solutions to the NCERT textbook’s own questions for Change and Development in Rural Society (Book 2, Chapter 4), with every question in the book’s own wording: first the eight back-of-chapter Questions (Question 1 is passage-based with two parts; the rest are discussion and project questions), then every in-text Activity and question the chapter asks along the way.
1 Back-of-chapter Questions
Q. Read the passage given and answer the questions: “The harsh working conditions suffered by labourers in Aghanbigha were an outcome of the combined effect of the economic power of the maliks as a class and their overwhelming power as members of a dominant caste. A significant aspect of the social power of the maliks was their ability to secure the intervention of various arms of the state to advance their interests. Thus, political factors decisively contributed to widening the gulf between the dominant class and the underclass.”
(i) Why do you think the maliks were able to use the power of the state to advance their own interests?
(ii) Why did labourers have harsh working conditions?
Answer (i): As the chapter explains, a dominant caste is not just numerically strong but also economically and politically powerful in its region, and dominates local society on both counts together. The maliks of Aghanbigha combined landownership (economic power, as a class of major landowners) with membership of the locally dominant caste (social and political power). The passage says only that a significant aspect of their social power was “their ability to secure the intervention of various arms of the state to advance their interests”. A plausible reading, not stated in the passage, is that this double advantage of class and dominant-caste standing gave them influence over those who ran the arms of the state, so political factors widened the gulf between the dominant class and the underclass.
Answer (ii): The passage itself gives the reason: the harsh working conditions were “an outcome of the combined effect of the economic power of the maliks as a class and their overwhelming power as members of a dominant caste”. The labourers belonged to the underclass in an agrarian structure where access to land, and therefore to power and privilege, was concentrated in the hands of the dominant landowning caste. As the chapter describes for agricultural labourers generally, they were usually paid below the statutory minimum wage, had insecure, daily-wage employment with underemployment for many days of the year, and in regions with entrenched “feudal” agrarian structures, remained under the power of landed castes with little ability to bargain, made worse here by the maliks’ additional ability to use political and state power against them.
Q. What measures do you think the government has taken, or should take, to protect the rights of landless agricultural labourers and migrant workers?
Answer: The chapter names schemes of the Government of India which “may provide unified help to farmers”: the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana, the Gram Uday se Bharat Uday Abhiyan, the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture and the Kisan Credit Card (the book’s list also includes the National Urban Mission, which is not a rural-livelihood scheme), along with rural infrastructure such as the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana (2014) for uninterrupted electricity. These are for farmers and rural India in general; the chapter names no measure specifically for landless labourers or migrant workers, so the rest of this answer is your own suggestion. The chapter’s own account of their vulnerability, being paid below the statutory minimum wage, facing underemployment, being preferred by employers precisely because they are easy to exploit, points to what more is needed: effective enforcement of minimum-wage law for both local and migrant labour, registration and welfare coverage for circular migrant workers (since Jan Breman’s study found they usually do not get even the minimum wage), and stronger implementation of the land reform and tenancy laws that already exist on paper but, as the chapter shows, are often not enforced.
Q. There are direct linkages between the situation of agricultural workers and their lack of upward socio-economic mobility. Name some of them.
Answer: The chapter gives several such linkages: (1) Agricultural labourers are mostly daily-wage workers, often paid below the statutory minimum wage, with insecure employment and underemployment for many days of the year, which leaves no surplus to invest in mobility. (2) Most marginal farmers and the landless belong to lower castes (officially SC/ST/OBC), so caste and class disadvantage reinforce each other. (3) Traditional, near-bonded labour relationships (begar, hereditary ties to a landowner) historically tied workers to a single dominant-caste employer, limiting their bargaining power and options. (4) Even where the Green Revolution raised productivity, its benefits went mainly to medium and large farmers who could afford the new inputs, while for landless labourers, employment and wages did increase in many areas, but rising prices and the shift from payment in kind to cash worsened the economic condition of most rural workers. (5) Migrant and circulating labourers, whom Jan Breman calls “footloose”, remain outside minimum-wage protection and stable employment even while moving in search of work, so mobility of location does not translate into upward mobility of income or status.
Q. What are the different factors that have enabled certain groups to transform themselves into new wealthy, entrepreneurial, dominant classes? Can you think of an example of this transformation in your state?
Answer: The chapter identifies these enabling factors: access to land, capital, technology and know-how that let some farmers benefit from the Green Revolution and produce a marketable surplus; belonging to a locally dominant caste, which already carried social, economic and political power; investing profits from agriculture into other businesses once cultivation became more profitable (as happened in coastal Andhra Pradesh, western Uttar Pradesh and central Gujarat, per Rutten, 1995); and access to spreading higher and professional education, especially private colleges, which let the children of these newly enriched families move into professional or white-collar occupations or start businesses, consolidating the family’s rise across a generation. (A state-specific example is for the student to research and describe, following this same pattern: a locally dominant landowning caste that used Green Revolution-era agricultural surplus to diversify into trade, transport, education, or politics.)
Q. Hindi and regional language films were often set in rural areas. Think of a film set in rural India and describe the agrarian society and culture that is shown in it. How realistic do you think the portrayal is? Have you seen any recent film set in rural areas? If not how would you explain it?
Answer: This is a project-style, open-ended question meant to connect the chapter’s concepts (agrarian structure, caste-class overlap, land reform, migration, contract farming) to a film the student has actually watched. A strong answer names a specific film, describes what it shows about landholding, caste hierarchy, or rural-urban migration, and evaluates its realism against the chapter’s own account, for instance whether it shows the caste-class correspondence the book describes, or the harsher realities of underemployment and migrant labour the book documents (which cinema often romanticises or omits). If the student has not seen a recent rural-set film, a reasonable explanation, in the student’s own words, is that Indian cities and their concerns tend to dominate media attention today, while rural India, despite still being the majority experience (69 per cent by the 2011 Census), receives comparatively little sustained media or cinematic attention.
Q. Visit a construction site in your neighbourhood, a brickyard, or other such place where you are likely to find migrant workers. Find out where the workers come from. How are they recruited from their home villages, who is the ‘mukadam’? If they are from rural areas, find out about their lives in their villages and why they have to migrate to find work.
Answer: This is a field-project question. Using the chapter as a guide: migrant workers typically come from drought-prone, less productive regions, and move seasonally to work on farms in Punjab and Haryana, brick kilns in U.P., or construction sites in cities such as New Delhi or Bangalore. The book does not define “mukadam”; that is what the question asks you to find out. In common usage (outside the book) a mukadam is a labour contractor who recruits groups of workers from their home villages and brings them to a worksite; confirm this in your interviews. Interview answers should be recorded under: village of origin, reason for migration (usually insufficient or insecure income at home, such as being landless or a marginal farmer), duration away from home, wages and working conditions, and whether family members (especially women, children, and the elderly) remain in the village, matching the pattern of male out-migration the chapter describes.
Q. Visit your local fruit-seller, and ask her/him about the fruits she/he sells, where they come from, and their prices. Find out what has happened to the prices of local products after fruits began to be imported from outside of India (such as apples from Australia). Are there any imported fruits cheaper than Indian fruits?
Answer: This is a field-project question connected to the chapter’s discussion of globalisation and liberalisation: since the late 1980s, India’s liberalisation policy and WTO membership have required opening Indian markets to imports, so imported fruits and food items that were unavailable a few years earlier under import-substitution policies now appear on local shelves, as the example in this very exercise question (apples from Australia) illustrates. A student’s interview should record which fruits are local versus imported, their relative prices, and the fruit-seller’s own account of what has happened to the prices of local fruit since imports arrived. Whether imports have helped buyers or hurt local growers is for your own findings to show; the chapter itself describes the effects on farmers: exposure to competition from the global market after decades of state support and protected markets.
Q. Collect information and write a report on the environmental situation in rural India. Examples of topics: pesticides; declining water table; impact of prawn farming in coastal areas; salination of soil and waterlogging in canal irrigated areas; loss of biodiversity. Possible source: State of India’s Environment Reports, Reports from Centre for Science and Development and the magazine Down to Earth.
Answer: This is a research-project question. The chapter itself flags the environmental costs of the Green Revolution and of heavy pesticide/fertiliser-dependent farming, including contract farming, as “often not ecologically sustainable” because of the high doses of chemical inputs it typically requires. A good report picks one of the listed topics (for instance pesticide overuse, or waterlogging and salination in canal-irrigated tracts) and connects it back to the chapter’s own account: the Green Revolution’s reliance on chemical inputs, and the entry of multinational fertiliser and pesticide companies as sellers of these inputs after government agricultural-extension support declined, both of which the chapter links to rising costs, farmer debt and ecological strain in rural India.
2 In-text Activities and Questions (asked within the chapter)
The chapter also asks questions inside the text: one in its opening pages and four in its Activity boxes. They are given here in the order the book prints them, with model answers. Where an activity asks you to find out or observe, the answer shows what a good response should contain; use it alongside your own findings.
Q. Find out about other harvest festivals.
Answer: Besides the book’s own examples (Pongal in Tamil Nadu, Bihu in Assam, Baisakhi in Punjab and Ugadi in Karnataka), other harvest festivals (outside the book) include Onam in Kerala, Makar Sankranti and Lohri in north and west India, Nuakhai in Odisha, Nabanna in West Bengal and Wangala among the Garos of Meghalaya. Like the festivals the book names, they celebrate the main harvest and mark the start of a new agricultural season, which shows the book’s point that culture in rural India is closely bound up with agriculture.
Q. Think of an important festival that is celebrated in your region that has its roots in agrarian society. What is the significance of the various practices or rituals that are associated with that festival, and how are they linked to agriculture?
Answer: Take Pongal in Tamil Nadu as an example. It is held when the new rice crop is harvested. Rice from the new harvest is boiled with milk and jaggery in a new pot until it overflows, a sign of abundance; the sun, whose energy ripens the crop, is thanked; and on the following day cattle, which pull the plough and carry the harvest, are washed, decorated and worshipped. Each ritual thanks the forces (sun, rain, cattle, land) on which farming depends and marks the end of one agricultural cycle and the start of the next. Any such festival (Bihu, Baisakhi, Onam, Lohri) can be analysed the same way: the timing follows the crop calendar and the rituals honour what agriculture needs.
Q. Most towns and cities in India have grown and encompassed surrounding villages. Can you identify an area of the city or town where you live that used to be a village, or areas that were once agricultural land? How do you think this growth takes place, and what happens to the people who used to make a living from that land?
Answer: Most Indian cities contain such areas; their names often still end in “-gaon”, “-pur” or “-khera”, and some still have an old village core (an “urban village”) surrounded by new colonies. The growth usually happens as the city needs land for housing, roads, industry and offices: farmland is bought by private builders or acquired by the government, and the village is absorbed into the municipal area. Landowning families may gain from selling land or from building rooms to rent out, and some start shops or transport businesses. But those who worked the land without owning it, such as tenants, agricultural labourers and service castes, lose their livelihood and are often pushed into insecure work in the city, such as construction, domestic work or street vending. This links to the book’s point that the rural and urban economies are increasingly interconnected.
Q. Think about what you have learned about the caste system. Outline the various linkages between the agrarian or rural class structure and caste. Discuss in terms of different access to resources, labour and occupation.
Answer:
- Access to resources: access to land shapes the rural class structure, and there is a rough correspondence between caste and class. In most regions the major landowning groups are the upper or middle ranked dominant castes (for example Jats and Rajputs of U.P., Vokkaligas and Lingayats of Karnataka, Kammas and Reddis of Andhra Pradesh, Jat Sikhs of Punjab), while most marginal farmers and the landless belong to SC, ST or OBC groups. The correspondence is not exact: Brahmins, though the highest caste, are usually not major landowners.
- Labour: in many regions the former “Untouchable” or dalit castes were not allowed to own land and provided most of the agricultural labour for dominant landowning groups. Practices such as begar made low-ranked castes give free labour to the landlord for a fixed number of days, and many workers were tied in hereditary labour relationships.
- Occupation: the caste system included specialist and service castes (such as potters, goldsmiths and dry cleaners) whose occupations served agriculture and village life; landowning castes cultivated or supervised, while low castes did manual farm labour. A “proprietary caste” owns most resources and commands the labour of others.
So caste position has broadly shaped who owns land, who works on it and what occupation a person follows, although the book stresses that the caste-class relationship “is not always straightforward”; where they do match, caste and class inequalities reinforce each other.
Q. Find out about the Bhoodan movement.
Answer: The book only asks you to find out about it and gives no details, so everything below is from outside the book. The Bhoodan (“land gift”) movement was started by Acharya Vinoba Bhave, a follower of Gandhi, in 1951 at Pochampalli village in the Telangana region, where a landlord offered land for landless dalit families. Vinoba walked from village to village asking landowners to donate part of their land voluntarily so that it could be given to the landless. It later grew into the Gramdan movement, in which whole villages pooled their land. Lakhs of acres were pledged, but much of the pledged land was never actually distributed, some of it was poor or disputed land, and the movement lost momentum. Check these details against a standard history source.
Q. Read the newspaper carefully. Listen to the television or radio news. How often are rural areas covered? What kind of issues are usually reported?
Answer: The chapter does not discuss media coverage, so your own observation over a week is the evidence. Count how many rural stories appear and note which issues they cover. You may find that rural stories appear mostly at times of crisis (droughts, floods, crop failure, farmers’ suicides, protests), but write what you actually see. Then compare the coverage with the chapter’s own issues: agricultural wages, migrant labour, land rights and women’s farm work. Keep in mind that most Indians live in villages (69 per cent, 2011 Census).