SSER Monographs

Resolution of the land question in contemporary rural India remains an unfinished task and a critical issue. With neoliberalism as the dominant ideology guiding state policy, Indian state has abdicated the responsibility of implementing land reforms. This makes it even more important for people interested in progressive change to revisit the land question and the need for land reforms.

This paper, based on the valedictory address delivered by Professor John Harriss in the SSER conference “Exploring New Research Frontiers in Social Sciences”, talks about the importance of historical and contextually grounded studies of social processes.

The Consumer Pyramids Household Surveys (CPHS) are high-frequency large-scale surveys that have come to be used widely, particularly to assess the short-term changes in the economic conditions of households such as the impact of Covid-19 pandemic policies on the economy.

An updated version of this paper is available here.

This monograph examines land relations in the village of Aavli in the Hoshangabad district of Madhya Pradesh. It draws upon data on the socio-economic profile of households, land ownership and tenancy collected via a census-type survey in 2018–19.

The economic reforms which were started in 1991 shifted the focus of fertilizer policies away from playing a leading role in building the fertilizer industry and ensuring the availability of fertilizers at affordable prices to farmers. Under the neo-liberal policy framework, reducing the fiscal burden of fertilizer subsidies and the foreign exchange burden of fertilizer-related imports became the overriding concerns of the state. Interestingly, the post-liberalisation policies have not only spectacularly failed in both these objectives, they have also resulted in a surge in the prices of fertilizers other than urea, and vastly accentuated the urea bias in nutrient application in Indian agriculture. The analysis in this paper shows that the decontrolling of the prices of fertilizers other than urea through the Nutrient Based Subsidy scheme has resulted in a situation in which, while the state continues to incur a huge amount of expenditure on subsidies for these fertilizers, fertilizer companies are not required to pass on the benefits to farmers.

This article provides a critical assessment of the likely impact of the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020 (FPTCA). It has been argued by the government that this act will lead to transparent and barrier-free trade in agricultural produce, and that the emergence of alternative private marketing channels will result in better price realisation for farmers’ produce.

Lack of preparedness to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in enormous hardships to farmers and rural workers, has caused considerable economic losses, and has dealt a serious blow to India’s rural economy. This paper discusses different ways in which agriculture and the rural economy of India have been impacted by the COVID-19 lockdown. It presents a details analysis of whatever data have become available to show that there is a large gap between the claims made by the government of support it has provided to rural households, and the reality that farmers and rural workers find themselves confronted with.

This paper shows that the lack of planning and preparation before implementation of the lockdown resulted in closure of all MGNREGS work for about one month during the COVID-19 lockdown period. Although the government exempted the MGNREGS from lockdown restrictions on April 20^th, the revival of work under the scheme has been slow. Problems in availability of funds and other administrative hurdles are the main reasons for this. The paper argues that a significant enhancement of employment creation through the MGNREGS can be critical for the revival of the economy for which collapse of demand is currently the biggest hurdle.

The sudden announcement of a national lockdown to contain the spread of COVID-19 has resulted in a severe disruption of food supply chains. The lockdown was announced without any preparation, and nothing was mentioned about excluding agricultural production and marketing operations from the purview of the lockdown when the Prime Minister first announced these restrictions. Once the lockdown was announced, governments scrambled to keep the supply chains functioning. On March 27, the third day of the lockdown, government announced that the agricultural marketing operations were exempted from lockdown restrictions.

A severe contraction of employment took place in India between 2004–05 and 2011–12. NSSO surveys show a fall in work participation rates in rural and urban areas, and for men and women. This monograph presents a detailed age-cohort analysis to throw light on dynamics of changes in structure of employment in the economy.

Our research on agricultural tenancy in India, of which this volume is the outcome, involved a detailed assessment of the 48^th (1991-92), 59^th (2002-03) and 70^th (2012-13) rounds of the NSSO Surveys of Land and Livestock Holdings (NSSO-SLLH). This assessment included detailed household-by-household corrections to remove a number of inconsistencies in the data. The corrected data are being released for public use along with this volume.

Analysing household level data from three consecutive All India Debt and Investment Surveys (AIDIS) covering a period of two decades (1991-92 to 2012-13), this study finds that inequality in asset ownership in India has risen during this period. While inequality has risen in both rural and urban India, urban inequality is much higher, and the pace towards higher inequality is much faster in urban than in rural India. The growing inequality, in both rural and urban India, was mostly driven by highly unequal holding of land and buildings, the two most important forms in which Indian households hold their wealth. In terms of asset accumulation, there was no improvement for socially marginalised groups (Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim) relative to others (non-Dalit, non-Adivasi and non-Muslim), as others continued to own, on an average, more than double the assets of Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim households during the entire two decades. Non-Dalit, non-Adivasi and non-Muslim households remain a highly heterogeneous group, with much higher within group inequality than the marginalised groups.

This paper presents a study of the impact of land acquisition and displacement on the livelihoods of people in Belgaria, a village in Dhanbad district in Jharkhand. The study village, Belgaria, is on the margins of the coal mines in Jharia. Agricultural land acquired from the village in 1982 was used to construct a township and rehabilitate about 1200 families displaced by underground fires and land subsidence in Jharia. Using this village as a case study, this paper shows that, in a location with considerable degree of differentiation in ownership of land, the impact of land acquisition on livelihoods of people can vary across households belonging to different classes. Evidence from the new Belgaria township, where families displaced by underground fires were rehabilitated, shows that the resilience with which displaced workers coped with the disruption in access to livelihoods varied across male and female workers, and across socio-economic status of displaced households. Livelihoods of workers who were engaged in casual labour in the coal fields, in particular women workers, were most adversely affected due to displacement.

This paper is a contribution towards understanding reasons behind declining female employment in India as indicated by recent rounds of large-sample Employment and Unemployment Surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey (NSS) Organisation.