Some Aspects of Agrarian Change in North Bengal: A Case Study of Two Villages from Naxalbari (original) (raw)
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Indian Journal of Economics and Development, 2019
Background/ Objective: This study is based on the primary survey conducted for doctoral thesis at CESP, JNU New Delhi. The study aims in studying, inter alia, land relations, production relations, and changes in these variables taken place in post economic reform period. Methods/ Statistical Analysis: The production relations in post economic reform period were studied by means of detailed primary study. A census survey was undertaken in a village of in Rajasthan in 2007. The census survey of the same village was repeated in 2013 to capture the changes. Findings: Data obtained from study village indicate growing agrarian distress due to increasing land and income inequality, increasing landlessness and disparity in access to government credit as well as government land for leasing. Integration of Indian agriculture with world market has posed many new agrarian challenges. Sudden increase in price of guar in the year 2012 in world market, which persisted even in 2013, has not only benefited guar cultivators but has also brought huge instability in the land rental market. On the one hand, it resulted in the area under cultivation of guar and on the other in the absence of legal tenancy contracts, it has resulted in dishonoring of oral contracts, changing forms of tenancy contracts, fall in tenancy practices and increasing economic insecurity of tenant farmers. Improvements/ Applications: Increased instability in agrarian market has resulted in more or less similar kind of situations in other part of the country, which requires government intervention to control instability.
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STRUCTURE OF THE RURAL LABOUR MARKET: AN INVESTIGATION INTO TWO VILLAGES IN WEST GODAVARI DISTRICT
The present article starts with a normative assumption that a well-formed labour market is a necessary condition for the development of a less developed economy. A well-formed labour market implies the separation of agricultural households into labour-demanding and labour-supplying households. This separation facilitates self-correction of the labour market through adjustment in wages. In the context of incompletely formed labour markets, the self-corrective mechanism in the labour market is also realised through non-labour market institutions like the land lease market. These resource adjustment mechanisms are illustrated through the study of choices available and actual alternatives realised by labour-supplying and labour-demanding households in two villages of West Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh. Although these two villages have different structures, non-labour market institutions play an important role in resource adjustment here
2014
report and providing constructive comments. We thank A Sudha Rani for her excellent research assistance in completion of the study and Pamela Samuel for helpful comments for linguistic improvement. We are grateful to Amit Chakravarty who has copy edited this volume and to Rajkumar B, for page layout. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors who alone are responsible for any errors in it. data for women in 1992 and 2007, the BMI indices have improved for women. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, inequality as measured by the Gini ratio stagnated or tended to decline, but since then has improved, except in the poorest Akola village. Facilities such as shops, eating places and flour mills have increased sharply in all villages. Cell phones have become ubiquitous, and motorbikes have spread. LPG connection, fans, refrigerators, TV sets, and toilets have improved living conditions. Pucca houses have replaced thatched houses built from local materials. The pathways to and success with development have differed sharply between villages depending on their agricultural endowment, their cropping and livestock opportunities, new agricultural technology, their access to canals, opportunities for well irrigation, their proximity to new factories and cities, and according to the way they have involved themselves in education, migration and diversification opportunities. The most successful villages benefited from several of these factors, including a sugar factory in a Shirapur village and the proximity to Hyderabad's new airport in a Mahbubnagar village. That agricultural opportunities are not necessarily the main factors shaping village development is strikingly illustrated by the Mahbubnagar village hardest hit by drought and major loss of tank irrigation: It has been able to significantly compensate for declining agricultural opportunities via non-farm labor participation, education and migration. The village with the poorest performance that is located in Akola did not get canal irrigation, has saline groundwater, is far from urban employment, is poorly served by its local government, and is riddled with factions. It has suffered both from poor agricultural and non-agricultural opportunities and governance problems. The villages therefore range from very successful to very unsuccessful participants in economic development. While agricultural endowments, developments and opportunities remain very important factors for prosperity, the importance of the non-farm and urban economy has become much more important. Income growth and poverty reduction have been most striking since the acceleration of economic growth in these two states, and most villages have found ways to benefit from it. v