Class 12 Sociology Book 2 Chapter 4 Change and Development in Rural Society Notes in English

India is still, first and foremost, a rural society. 69 per cent of Indians lived in rural areas according to the 2011 Census, and most of them earn their living from agriculture or a trade linked to it. That makes agricultural land India’s single most important productive resource. But land is more than a way of earning money. It is also the most important form of property, and agriculture is a way of life: many of our cultural practices and patterns can be traced to our agrarian backgrounds. Most New Year festivals in different regions of India actually celebrate the main harvest season and herald the beginning of a new agricultural season: Pongal in Tamil Nadu, Bihu in Assam, Baisakhi in Punjab and Ugadi in Karnataka, to name just a few.

But “rural” does not mean “only agriculture”. Villages have always supported specialist castes and craftspeople who kept farming and village life running: potters, carpenters, weavers, ironsmiths, goldsmiths, story-tellers, astrologers, priests, water-distributors and oil-pressers. Many of these traditional occupations have declined steadily since the colonial period, as machine-made goods replaced hand-made ones. At the same time, new rural livelihoods have grown: people living in villages today may work in the Postal or Education Departments, in factories, or in the army, earning a living from work that has nothing to do with farming.

1 Agrarian Structure: Caste and Class in Rural India

Agricultural land is the most important productive resource in a village, but it is not divided equally. In some regions most households own at least a tiny plot; in others, nearly half own none at all and depend entirely on agricultural labour or other work. Women are usually excluded from actually owning land, because of the prevailing patrilineal kinship system (where property and family lineage pass down through the male line) and mode of inheritance. By law women are supposed to have an equal share of family property; in reality they have only limited rights and some access to land, as part of a household headed by a man.

Access to land sorts rural households into three broad positions, from the most secure income to the least secure:

1.1 How caste and class overlap

Caste and class are closely linked in rural India, though not perfectly. In most regions, the upper and middle castes also had the best access to land, resources, power and privilege, so caste rank and class rank tend to move together. But this is only broadly true, not exact: in most areas, for instance, Brahmins are not major landowners even though they are the highest caste. This means Brahmins are usually not counted as part of the landowning agrarian structure, even though they still live and belong within rural society.

While dominant landowning groups are usually middle or high-ranked castes, most marginal farmers and landless people belong to lower caste groups, officially classified as Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes or Other Backward Classes. In many regions, the former “Untouchable” or dalit castes were historically not allowed to own land at all, and instead supplied most of the agricultural labour for dominant landowning groups. This left such castes with little choice but to work for the dominant landowning groups, giving those landowners the steady labour force they needed to farm intensively and earn higher returns.

In most regions of the country, a “proprietary caste” group, a caste that owns most of a region’s resources and can command the labour of others to work for it, holds this kind of position. Until recently, practices such as begar (free or forced labour) were common in many parts of northern India, where members of low-ranked caste groups had to work a fixed number of days each year for the village zamindar or landlord (a large landowner, often locally powerful too), often as hereditary, near bonded labour. Such practices are now legally abolished, but continue in many areas.

2 The Impact of Land Reforms

2.1 The colonial background

The agrarian structure has changed enormously since the pre-colonial period. Even in pre-colonial times, dominant castes cultivated the land but did not directly own it: local kings or zamindars (landlords who were also politically powerful, usually of the Kshatriya or another high caste) controlled it, and cultivators had to hand over a large part of their produce.

When the British colonised India, they often ruled through these local zamindars and gave them even more control over land than before, while also imposing heavy land revenue (tax). Because heavy land revenue (tax) was imposed on this system, zamindars extracted as much produce or money as they could from cultivators. As a result, agricultural production stagnated or declined through much of British rule: overtaxed peasants fled oppressive landlords, and recurring famines and wars further reduced the population in these areas. This was the zamindari system. In areas under direct British rule, the raiyatwari system operated instead (“raiyat” means cultivator in Telugu). Here, the person legally responsible for paying tax was called the “actual cultivator”, but the book flags this label as misleading: these were often themselves landlords, not the people who actually tilled the soil. Either way, they paid tax directly to the government, with no zamindar in between. Because the tax burden was lighter and cultivators had more reason to invest, raiyatwari areas became relatively more productive and prosperous.

2.2 Land reform after Independence

After Independence, Nehru’s government began a programme of planned development. It paired agrarian reform with industrialisation, as a direct response to three problems: low farm productivity, dependence on imported foodgrain, and deep rural poverty. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, a series of land reform laws were passed at both the national and state level. They fell into three categories:

Land reform’s progress was uneven across states, and although the agrarian structure has changed substantially since colonial times, it remains highly unequal. The book’s own conclusion is important to remember: land reforms are necessary not only to boost agricultural growth, but also to eradicate poverty in rural areas and bring about social justice.

3 The Green Revolution and Its Social Consequences

Land reforms had only a limited impact on rural society in most regions. In contrast, the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s brought sharp change wherever it reached.

Productivity rose sharply, and India became self-sufficient in foodgrain for the first time in decades, a real achievement of both the government and the scientists involved. But sociologists studying these areas also found real social costs, alongside adverse environmental effects.

The book uses two different words for cultivators, depending on whether they can sell what they grow. Because the new inputs were expensive, it was mainly medium and large farmers who could afford them and reap the benefit; small and marginal farmers could not spend as much. In many cases landowners took land back from their tenants to cultivate it directly, since farming had become more profitable. This worsened the condition of tenants, the landless and marginal holders even as it enriched large farmers. New farm machinery (tillers, tractors, threshers and harvesters, used especially in Punjab and parts of Madhya Pradesh) displaced the service-caste groups who used to carry out these agriculture-related activities, and this displacement sped up rural-to-urban migration.

A second phase of the Green Revolution began in the 1980s, when farmers in dry and semi-arid regions took up Green Revolution methods too. There was a significant shift from dry to irrigated cultivation and in the crops grown. Increasing commercialisation and dependence on the market (for instance, where cotton cultivation has been promoted) increased rather than reduced livelihood insecurity, because farmers who once grew food for consumption now depend on the market for their incomes. More generally, in most Green Revolution areas farmers have switched from a multi-crop system (which spreads risk) to a mono-crop regime, so there is nothing to fall back on if the crop fails.

The Green Revolution also worsened regional inequality: it was promoted more in the western and southern parts of the country, and in Punjab, Haryana and western U.P., than in the eastern parts (Das, 1999). Some regions continue to have an entrenched “feudal” agrarian structure, in which the landed castes and landlords maintain power over the lower castes, landless workers and small cultivators. The sharp caste and class inequality in these regions has fed various kinds of violence, including inter-caste violence, in recent years.

The book also cautions against assuming that “scientific” farming is automatically better. It is often thought that teaching “scientific” farming methods will improve farmers’ conditions, but Indian farmers have cultivated the land for centuries, long before the Green Revolution, and have deep traditional knowledge of it. Much of that knowledge, like the many traditional seed varieties developed by farmers over the centuries, is being lost as hybrid, high-yielding and genetically modified seeds are promoted as more productive and “scientific”.

4 Transformations in Rural Society after Independence

Several profound changes in rural social relations took place after Independence, especially in Green Revolution regions. The book lists four:

• an increase in the use of agricultural labour as cultivation became more intensive
• a shift from payment in kind (grain) to payment in cash
• a loosening of traditional bonds or hereditary relationships between landowners and agricultural workers (known as bonded labour)
• the rise of a class of “free” wage labourers

The sociologist Jan Breman described the changing relationship between landlords (usually dominant caste) and agricultural workers (usually low caste) as a shift from “patronage to exploitation” (Breman, 1974). “Patronage” here means a landlord’s traditional, paternalistic protection of dependent workers in exchange for their loyalty and labour. Some scholars read this as a sign of a transition to capitalist agriculture, since capitalist production rests on separating workers from the means of production, the land, tools and other resources needed to produce something, and on the use of “free” wage labour instead.

This transformation actually began in the colonial period (large tracts of 19th-century Maharashtra were already given over to cotton grown for the world market), but it accelerated sharply after Independence, as the state invested in irrigation, roads, electricity and agricultural credit through banks and cooperatives. The Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana, launched in 2014, is the book’s own example of continuing government effort to secure uninterrupted rural power supply.

In agriculturally rich regions such as coastal Andhra Pradesh, western Uttar Pradesh and central Gujarat, well-to-do farmers from the dominant castes invested their farm profits into other businesses, creating new regional entrepreneurial and political elites. Spreading higher and professional education, especially private colleges, let these new rural elites educate their children, many of whom then joined white-collar work or business, feeding the expansion of the urban middle class.

5 Circulation of Labour

As traditional patronage bonds between labourers and landlords broke down, and demand for labour rose in prosperous Green Revolution regions such as Punjab, a pattern of seasonal migration emerged: thousands of workers circulate between their home villages and more prosperous areas offering more work and higher wages. Rising rural inequality from the mid-1990s has pushed many households to combine several occupations to survive, adding another reason to migrate. As a livelihood strategy, men migrate out periodically in search of work and better wages, while women and children are often left behind with elderly grandparents.

Migrant workers usually come from drought-prone, less productive regions, and travel for part of the year to farms in Punjab and Haryana, brick kilns in U.P., or construction sites in cities such as New Delhi or Bangalore.

Wealthy farmers often prefer migrant workers over the local working class for harvesting and other intensive work, because migrants are easier to exploit and can be paid less. This creates a striking local pattern, especially in sugarcane-growing areas: local landless labourers leave their own village to find work elsewhere during peak season, while migrant workers are brought in from outside to work the local farms. Migration and lack of job security have created very poor working and living conditions for these workers.

6 Globalisation, Liberalisation and Rural Society

India’s liberalisation policy, followed since the late 1980s, has had a major impact on agriculture. Membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) aims at freer international trade and required opening Indian markets to imports, which is why imported fruits and food items, once unavailable under earlier import-substitution policies (deliberately producing goods at home instead of importing them), now sit on local store shelves. India’s decision to import wheat reversed the country’s earlier policy of self-reliance in foodgrain, and revived uneasy memories of the early years after Independence, when India had to depend on imported American food grain to feed its people, before the Green Revolution made the country self-sufficient.

6.1 Contract farming

In regions such as Punjab and Karnataka, farmers contract with multinational companies (the book names PepsiCo) to grow crops such as tomatoes and potatoes. Contract farming is now very common for specialised produce: cut flowers, grapes, figs, pomegranates, cotton and oilseeds.

A second, more widespread face of globalisation is the entry of multinational companies as sellers of seeds, pesticides and fertilisers. Government “agricultural extension” agents (officials who visited farmers to give free advice on new seeds and methods) have been steadily replaced in villages by company agents, who are often farmers’ only source of information about new seeds or methods, while also having a direct interest in selling their own products. This has deepened farmers’ dependence on expensive inputs, cut their profits, pushed many into debt, and added to an ecological crisis in rural areas.

Many farmers who took their own lives were marginal farmers trying to raise productivity through Green Revolution methods, a path that meant real risk: production costs rising sharply as subsidies fell, unstable markets, and heavy borrowing to afford expensive inputs. The book adds that farmers’ suicides are basically associated with debt, as well as natural disasters that cause crop failure. The government runs several schemes meant to give farmers unified support and improve rural livelihoods: