Changes that the agrarian social structure in India is undergoing. Comment. (2009)
The agrarian structure is changing less because any single class has displaced another than because a set of external processes has been working on it simultaneously since the 1950s. Sorting the change by driver rather than by class shows why the outcome is uneven, and it is on the sum of these drivers that a comment must be offered.
The drivers and what each has altered
| Driver | What it changed |
|---|---|
| Land reform | Abolished intermediaries and created a new dominant landowning peasantry; tenancy reform and ceilings failed, driving leasing underground |
| Commercialisation and the Green Revolution | Turned patrons into employers; produced a surplus-accumulating rich peasant; widened regional gaps |
| Decay of jajmani | Monetisation, market goods and Dalit refusal of hereditary service replaced customary grain shares with cash wages |
| Liberalisation after 1991 | Input and output markets, contract farming and corporate buyers moved appropriation from the landlord to the value chain |
| Mechanisation | Displaced attached labour, made ploughing and threshing capital-intensive, deepened dependence on credit |
| Non-farm transition and migration | Jan Breman‘s circulating, contractor-recruited footloose labour replaced the bonded hali |
| Education and aspiration | The young exit cultivation; Dipankar Gupta notes villagers’ own disenchantment with farming |
Irrigation, the precondition of the whole package, still reached only 55 per cent of gross cropped area by 2020-21, up from 49.3 per cent in 2015-16 (Economic Survey 2024-25) — which is why these drivers act with different force in Punjab and in Bundelkhand.
The state as an agrarian actor
Welfare has become a structural factor in its own right. MGNREGA generated over 309 crore person-days in 2023-24, averaging 52.09 days per participating household. By offering a statutory fallback wage it raises the reservation wage of the agricultural labourer and weakens the landowner’s traditional hold — arguably the single most effective solvent of dependence since zamindari abolition. Politically, the same period produced organised farmer movements and caste-based parties whose agenda is procurement price and input subsidy, not land redistribution — a shift of the agrarian question from property to terms of trade.
Comment: what do these add up to?
- Not a completed capitalist transformation. Production relations are commodified but accumulation is weak: PLFS shows the workforce share in agriculture rising to 46.1 per cent in 2023-24, so labour is not being released to industry.
- Not Gupta’s “vanishing village” either. The claim that the village has dissolved into an urbanising continuum overstates the mobility available to households without land or education, and understates how firmly caste still allocates that mobility.
- Closest to Surinder S. Jodhka’s reading. His Haryana restudies describe de-agrarianisation without de-peasantisation: livelihoods move out of cultivation while people, caste relations and the settlement itself stay put.
Conclusion
What is underway is a structural decoupling — of income from land, of authority from landownership, and of residence from occupation — without the classical agrarian transition that would follow. The village is being emptied of agriculture faster than it is being emptied of people, and that mismatch is the defining agrarian fact of contemporary India.