Note: In preparation for the Raj Centennial conference, CDS faculty and PhD scholars have put together notes on the research work from the Centre using the conference panels as categories. This note on Agriculture and Rural Economy should be interpreted as a work-in-progress, and the Centre hopes to work on it further based on feedback and more archival exploration. Further, we acknowledge that there are different possible thematic narratives of the research; the present note can be seen as a preliminary perspective constructed by the corresponding authors using a style and approach preferred by them.
Agriculture and Rural Economy
A systematic review of research on the Indian agrarian and rural economy at the CDS indicates three recurrent ideological and methodological considerations. The first is the distinction between ‘agricultural’ development related to aggregate farm output production and ‘agrarian’ concerns pertinent to farming livelihoods and class differentiation. This distinction produced research with consistent focus on distribution and structural reforms to address systemic inequality. Second, there is emphasis on methodological and conceptual pluralism rather than restricting studies to the paradigm of rational choice economics. This helped to advance research that was grounded in inductive methods and gave importance to local context and historical background to understand and explain issues pertinent to the rural economy. Third, while earlier studies on agrarian relations and the rural economy tended to ignore social institutions such as caste and gender, later studies addressed them to some extent.
Distinguishing the ‘agricultural’ from the ‘agrarian’
At the CDS, Raj’s research on the rural economy gave primacy to analysis of rural livelihoods more than aggregate agricultural production. With this orientation, issues of underemployment, credit, and land reforms, which could bring systemic changes to distribution were taken more seriously than ‘quick fix’ solutions like higher price supports and loan waivers (K. N. Raj, 1981). Raj was critical of the assumption that policies such as higher support prices and loan waivers were automatically ‘farmer-friendly’ and questioned who the beneficiaries were and how many of the farmers benefited from such policies, given the inequalities of land and access to capital. Following this intellectual approach, many PhD theses at the CDS analysed developments in farm institutions and distributional impacts especially across classes.
In her PhD thesis, Duvvury (1986) analysed the impact of tobacco commercialisation on owner-cultivators, tenant cultivators, rentiers, and agricultural labour. Sivanandan’s (1992) PhD thesis studied the impact of land reforms on land distribution in 1971-83 and found that there was a positive impact for intermediate castes but not for scheduled castes (SCs). Mishra’s (1999) PhD thesis explored microprocesses in tribal Odisha and the varied impacts of institutional innovations like grain banks and forward trading on farmers from different classes. He showed that such institutional arrangements disproportionately increased the financial burden on smallholders. Analysing alternative irrigation arrangements among farmers in Kerala’s Chalakudy region, Neetha’s (2003) PhD thesis indicated how geographical variables like distance from the canal influenced the choice of private investment or collective action efforts for irrigation. Her work emphasised how private investment by a few farmers could trigger a ‘tragedy of the commons’ and questioned the state’s uniform irrigation pricing policies. Swain (2012) studied the impact of contract farming on efficiency of production in Andhra Pradesh and investigated whether contract farming increased returns from farming. His PhD thesis underlined the efficiency and yield differences that emerge out of contract farming and raised concerns regarding sustainability and inequality.
Land is a primary concern in the analysis of rural economy in recent work at the CDS. Analysing the strike by an all-women union in Munnar’s tea belt, J. Raj (2019, 2022) underlines that the protesting women’s demands was for the state to implement land redistribution rather than increasing wages and bonuses in the plantations. Similarly, in his PhD thesis and other work, Yadu (2015, 2017, 2022) kept the land question at the centre of study of agrarian change in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. John Kujur and collaborators foregrounded the issue of land alienation among Adivasis and analysed the consequences on the mobility of Adivasi women (Kujur, 2021; Kujur et al., 2024; Kujur & Mishra, 2020).
Methodological pluralism
K. N. Raj had forcefully cautioned against uncritical use of mainstream economic frameworks. In K. N. Raj (1976), he highlights how predictions based on neoclassical economics poorly predict extent of tenancy, sharecropping, and land use patterns as they typically ignore the political economy and power structures in villages. By underlining the importance of local context and institutions, social values, power, and historical background, Raj’s approach opened the study of the village economy to methodological and conceptual pluralism. Apart from orientation to market frictions imbibed through Keynesian economic analysis, future research at the CDS used varied conceptual frameworks related to institutional economics and Marxian economics. The CDS also has a tradition of using varied data sources and methods to research the rural economy. For instance, Sivanandan (1979) used colonial Census data to analyse caste and economic mobility. In his PhD thesis (Sivanandan, 1992), he used data collected from a village census in 1971 and a sample survey in 1983. While analysing the role of external capital in tobacco cultivation in Guntur, Duvvury (1986) used colonial settlement reports starting from 1865. Shah (1985) used historical data spanning two centuries to study transformation of labour relations in Tamil Nadu’s Chengalpattu. In her PhD thesis, Sundari (1985) used colonial census data and data from her own survey to uncover caste-class configurations in the period 1875-1980. Yadu (2022) revisited two villages studied by John Harriss and J. Jeyaranjan in northern Tamil Nadu to analyse agrarian change. J. Raj (2019, 2022) used a distinctly original approach to ethnography using situational analysis to examine crisis and resistance in the plantation economy in Kerala’s Munnar and Peermade.
Critical social lenses
Although K. N. Raj and his cohort of researchers did not grapple with the tenacity of caste and gender in the rural economy, subsequent research at the CDS did address this gap substantially. In her PhD thesis based on a historical census data, and primary survey of 30 villages in Chengalpattu, Sundari (1985) highlighted how caste-class configurations played a significant role in agrarian relations. Shah (1985) studied the transformation of labour dependency relationships between privileged and oppressed caste groups. More recently, Yadu (2022) emphasised the importance of embedding village structural transformation processes within their social relations and local ecology. J. Raj (2019) and Kujur (2021) bring the idea of intersectionality with their analysis centred around Dalit and Adivasi women. J. Raj (2019) analysed how Dalit women workers in the tea sector staged an extraordinary wildcat strike and also situated their conceptions of inequality, justice, and humiliation. Kujur (2021) highlighted how Adivasi women bear a disproportionate burden of landlessness which restricted their upward mobility and reduced their labour force participation. Thus, over the decades CDS studies have gone from peeling (economic differentiation) like a potato to peeling like an onion.
References
Duvvury, N. (1986). Commercial Capital and Agrarian Structure: A Study of Guntur Tobacco Economy [PhD Thesis]. Centre for Development Studies / Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Kujur, J. (2021). Land Alienation and Occupational Changes among Adivasis in India [PhD Thesis]. Centre for Development Studies / Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Kujur, J., & Mishra, U. S. (2020). Land vulnerability among Adivasis in India. Land Use Policy, 99, 105082.
Kujur, J., Mishra, U. S., Rajan, S. I., & Mallick, H. (2024). Marginals within the marginalised: Exploring the changes in occupational pattern among Adivasi women in the context of land alienation in India. World Development, 182, 106715.
Mishra, S. (1999). Micro-Processes and Institutions in Tribal Agrarian Economies: A Study of Two villages in Orissa [PhD Thesis]. Centre for Development Studies / Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Neetha, N. (2003). Institutional Choice in Irrigation: A Case Study of Distribution in a Command Area in Kerala [PhD Thesis]. Centre for Development Studies / Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Raj, J. (2019). Beyond the unions: The Pembillai Orumai women’s strike in the south Indian tea belt. Journal of Agrarian Change, 19(4), 671–689.
Raj, J. (2022). Plantation crisis: Ruptures of Dalit life in the Indian tea belt. UCL Press.
Raj, K. N. (1976). Village India and its Political Economy. CDS Working Paper, 42.
Raj, K. N. (1981). Peasants and Potatoes. CDS Working Paper, 123.
Shah, M. (1985). The Kaniatchi form of labour. Economic and Political Weekly, 20(30), PE65–PE78.
Sivanandan, P. (1979). Caste, class and economic opportunity in Kerala: An empirical analysis. Economic and Political Weekly, 14, 475–480.
Sivanandan, P. (1992). Caste and Economic Opportunities: A Case Study of Effect of Educational Development and Land Reform on the Employment and Income Earning Opportunities of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes in Kerala [PhD Thesis]. Centre for Development Studies / Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Sundari, T. K. (1985). Caste and Agrarian Structure: A Study of Chinglepet District [PhD Thesis]. Centre for Development Studies / Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Swain, B. B. (2012). Determinants of Farmers’ Participation in Contract Farming: The Cases of Gherkin and Paddy Seed in Andhra Pradesh, India. Millennial Asia, 3(2), 169–185.
Yadu, C. R. (2015). The Land Question and the Mobility of the Marginalized: A Study of Land Inequality in Kerala. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy: A Triannual Journal of Agrarian South Network and CARES, 4(3), 327–370.
Yadu, C. R. (2017). Some Aspects of Agrarian Change in Kerala. Journal of Land and Rural Studies, 5(1), 12–30.
Yadu, C. R. (2022). The Agrarian Question and the Transition of Rural Labour in India [PhD Thesis]. Centre for Development Studies / Jawaharlal Nehru University.