The Problem
THE BJP discovered, or rather rediscovered, rural India, the ‘poor farmer’ and the ‘poor village’ during the recent national budget. Yet, the rural, the village, agriculture and agriculturists are now little more than blurred entities whose trajectories have become difficult to document. The rural is no longer the village and the village does not have only agriculture as its mainstay; agriculture is manifesting many avatars and agriculturists themselves are differentiating into a wide spectrum of classes and castes. So fast and complex have the changes in rural India become that only interdisciplinary perspectives can provide us a lens to understand it. Hemmed in by larger macro-economic and political changes and reconfigured by a constellation of local specificities, rural India is now a mosaic of regional variations with some sub-regions showing comparable and similar trends across the country. Despite such changes, some foundational structures persist – caste still remains the grid on which access to resources, political clout and life chances are determined – along with the pulsations triggered by increasing incursions of capital and markets.
The immediate post-Green Revolution period witnessed investments of agrarian surplus, partly in agriculture but more substantially in the non-agricultural economy, giving rise to a ‘provincial propertied class’ as noted famously by the late K. Balagopal. Currently, however, we are witnessing a different phenomenon. Non-agrarian capital is increasingly finding its way into the rural, but less as investment in agriculture and more in land markets seeking speculative gains. Rural land is being incorporated into a real estate grid and a regime of accumulation that relies more on speculative rents rather than on surplus generated through productive use of land. Clearly this is also tied to policy shifts since the 1990s that sought to open up land markets for capital. Liberalization of credit for real estate, offer of ‘geo bribes’ for capital to set up special economic zones, and reliance on revenues from taxes on land transactions by state governments have all fuelled this process.
At the other end, post-reform India has given rise to a growing class of wealthy individuals who are looking to park their surplus funds and black money in real estate. The surge in prices of rural land as a result of this process of financialization of rural land markets has meant that small and marginal farmers cannot afford to buy land at such high prices to consolidate their land holdings. Land markets, instead, tend to dispossess the small holders as they can at best participate as sellers so as to use the proceeds to pay off debts.
The role of speculative capital in fuelling land markets is even more visible in the case of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) where little productive investment has taken place post land acquisition. By allowing for use of a part of the land acquired for SEZs for real estate activity, the state ends up actively encouraging such land use change that benefits the speculator. Even in the few instances of productive investments actually flowing into these zones, aspects of employment generation are far from desirable. To begin with, the activity generates far less employment than what SEZ promoters claim in their application. Two, often those who are employed are not from households whose livelihoods have been destroyed, thereby generating spatial inequalities in labour market access. Finally, most jobs in SEZs are temporary and contractual with hardly any employment security and seldom lead to a long-term career.
In this context of growing capitalization are also disturbing trends which indicate a growing volume of the marginalized majority – those owning less than two hectares of land and accounting for about 86 per cent of all cultivators. What accounts for the reproduction of this large volume of the disadvantaged who, in typically Chayanovian mode, continue to exploit themselves to somehow eke out a bare existence? More details about the household dynamics are required if we are to understand how and why the expansionary forms of ‘welfare governmentality’ (such as the MGNREGA, midday meal schemes, right to elementary education, anganwadis, and so on) fail to cater to the needs of the marginalized majority as they continue to suffer from malnutrition and food insecurity.
That the most excruciating modes of labour extraction include new forms of agrestic servitude and bondage, combined with the insecurities that the vast and informal labour market is built upon, indicates the depredations that the rural working poor face. While traditional forms of control over agricultural labour may have waned in most parts of the country, contemporary labour regimes in agriculture are not free of coercion as they continue to be locked into employment contracts through credit. Such coercive relations are also found in new non-farm employment as is the case in powerlooms or brick kilns. Even as households seek to diversify away from unremunerative agriculture, non-farm employment avenues only contribute to their precarity. The construction sector has been a major absorber of labour exiting agriculture, but remains notorious for its poor working conditions. The persistence of the self-employed/exploited outside agriculture only suggests an inability of this segment of workers to enter circuits of capitalist production.
The emergence of new forms of self-employment and their link with agriculture remain unclear. Women’s labour participation in agriculture, for instance, shows contradictory trends. Invisibilized in most official statistics and legal ledgers, their numbers show declining labour participation, though in some pockets they have emerged as key workers and decision makers. Such feminization of agriculture has implications for both agriculture and the family/household – what can be grown, marketed or retained for the family, how decisions are made and to what extent women are empowered (in terms of rights to decision making, access to resources, freedom of choice, etc.).
In addition to the existence of these varied forms of deprivation and distress, we now also have pockets of new rural affluence made possible by an integration of the dominant proprietary classes and castes into urban and market economies and the access to resources made possible by the capture and extrapolation of political power and privilege. Often this is tied to appropriation of rents generated from rural resources like sand, other building materials and minerals, which are an integral part of the extractive economy. Further, the growing consumption among this class compounds environmental problems which have now created an emergency situation. Contamination of groundwater and sources of drinking water, overuse of fertilizers and pesticides by poor farmers seeking to reduce the risks posed by vulnerability of agricultural production, antibiotic residue of factory-style livestock production and degradation of common property resources have, among others, emerged as major ecological risks for the rural population.
Such a dualism is partially responsible for the truncated transformation of rural India. Markers of a highly capitalized and commercialized agriculture coexist with swathes of the rural population that continue to reproduce themselves under conditions of growing vulnerability and distress. Thus, even as a very small segment is diversifying through investment of surplus out of agriculture, the bulk of rural households are diversifying through investment of their labour or through investments in private education that compound their financial stress. Their move out of agriculture is never complete, confronted as they are by precarious employment in the urban economy. In other words, the rural serves to cushion employment shocks of the urban, even as temporary urban employment helps rural households survive shocks emanating from the agrarian economy. The transformations of rural-urban-rural flows of labour and capital as an outcome of these changes are yet to be adequately understood.
The Green Revolution is now in a state of fatigue. Productivity levels have either declined or are stagnant and the fallouts are visible in the ecological, economic and social crises that much of rural India is experiencing. As the plural agricultures of rural India increasingly begin to cede to the march of capital and technology, the wealth of long-evolved repositories of knowledge systems stands threatened. Adding to the pressure generated by capital and market are the current biotechnology regimes that are acting as the new spectres promising bountiful production through miracle seeds and technologies. How such techno-science will impact the fabric of rural India is yet to be gauged and its potential to damage not only biodiversity but also the cultural diversity of agrarian India are issues that need serious attention. In the lack of transparency and democratic processes in which new biotechnologies are being introduced, lie threats not only to the biosecurity of agriculture but also to the economic autonomy and strength of all cultivators. Other suggestions for ‘revival’ of the agrarian economy too are fraught with adverse consequences.
As expansionary and exploitative capital in search of mineral and natural resources makes inroads into the rural hinterland, vast tracts of the Adivasi belt experience both expropriation of their natural resources and expulsion from their homelands. Such trends have resulted in making these tracts the new killing fields of globalizing India and what we are witnessing is a combination of multiple forms of socio-ecological distress with intense human rights violations. These conditions raise disturbing questions about the nature of the polity in the hinterlands and among the most marginalized, and the implications these have for democratic norms. That this trend may be central is also buttressed by the fact that political mobilization among agriculturists is fragmented and patchy, and no substantial national level movement is in a position to represent the spectrum of cultivators and their interests. The processes and structures of decentralized democracy via the panchayati raj institutions, tell us mixed stories. Where implemented in both spirit and content, the PRIs have catalyzed key changes enabling visibility and vocality of disadvantaged groups. In most cases, however, the hegemonic system of caste-class alliances continues to hold sway and proxy candidates negate the potential of decentralized administration. Imbalances in the old economic and political hierarchies and privileges have led to varied forms of violence, which now unfortunately include growing communalism in rural India.
Neo-liberal India has, interestingly, also witnessed the introduction of a series of rights based social welfare legislations by the central government such as the MGNREGA, Right to Food, and Right to Education. Such governmental welfare programmes, in tandem with several others initiated by state governments, while generating social changes at the margin and reducing absolute poverty to an extent, are however poor compensation for processes that are simultaneously undermining rural livelihoods. Further, they are marked by regional unevenness in implementation, with the poorer states faring relatively badly. Among other issues, such regional differences clearly point to weak institutional capacities and less effective collective action to carry out such welfare programmes.
Another important aspect of contemporary rural India is the emergence of new forms of intra- and inter-caste differentiation and caste based mobilization and violence. While the Indian rural has traditionally been a caste-agrarian economy, recent caste based mobilizations are not mere reproductions of the rural past. Often, they are driven by a combination of changes in the rural economy and integration of rural livelihoods and politics with the urban, generating new configurations of power and identity that once again require closer scrutiny.
Even as news about suicides by farmers is highlighted to portray agriculturists as failures despite an unprecedented economic boom, there is often a neglect of the myriad types of innovations and creative forms of resilience that agriculturists have evolved. Agriculture in the national imaginary has reached a crucial juncture: should it be allowed to reproduce itself in the current structures of diverse forms of production or should it be encouraged to transit into consolidated capitalist holdings? Or, can it be reorganized into cooperative units without the presence of the ubiquitous middleman? What models of agricultural practice would be appropriate and viable for the nation?
The national question of the rural and agriculture is not only about the type of agriculture or the role of capitalism. Instead, it is increasingly about the citizenship of the average cultivator and her/his voice, agency and views on the national stage. The future of the nation’s life lies in locating the position, presence, and representation of the kisan.
A.R. VASAVI and M. VIJAYABASKAR
