Explain the implications and the impact of globalization in situating the changing agrarian class structure in India. (2023)
Before 1991 the agrarian question in India was about land — who owned it, who tilled it, who took the rent. Globalisation relocated the point of appropriation from the landlord to the market and the value chain. Class position is now set as much by access to credit, inputs and buyers as by title to the soil.
The globalising forces
- Liberalisation (1991) and the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (1995) opened Indian agriculture to world prices, disciplined subsidies and market access, and exposed the cultivator to volatility he had never had to insure against.
- Input commercialisation. Seed, fertiliser, pesticide and groundwater became purchased commodities from corporate suppliers, shifting the cost structure of cultivation and the terms of trade against the farmer.
- Cash-crop shift. Cotton, oilseeds, horticulture and export crops displaced food grains in irrigated and semi-arid tracts, raising both returns and exposure to price collapse.
- Contract farming and corporate retail inserted the buyer between producer and market; the Union government’s Model Agriculture Produce and Livestock Contract Farming and Services (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2018 sought to regularise it, and the three farm laws of 2020 attempted the same on a national scale.
The impact on class structure
| Class position | What globalisation did |
|---|---|
| Capitalised cultivator | Access to credit, machinery, water and contracts; leases in land through reverse tenancy — land moves from cultivating to non-cultivating owners |
| Small and marginal owner | Squeezed by input costs and volatility; 86.08% of the 146.45 million holdings, averaging 1.08 ha (Agriculture Census 2015-16); 50.2% of agricultural households indebted |
| Agricultural labourer | Casualised, circulating and increasingly non-agricultural; PLFS 2025 puts casual labour at 20.2% of all workers |
| Women cultivators | Feminisation as men exit — female operational holders 13.96%, holding only 11.72% of operated area |
- Depeasantisation. The NSS Situation Assessment Survey (2019) found the average agricultural household earning ₹10,218 a month, with wages (₹4,063) exceeding net crop production (₹3,798). The household is no longer peasant; it is a wage-dependent unit that also farms. Jan Breman’s Footloose Labour (1996) names the resulting social type — circulating, contractor-recruited workers who are neither peasant nor proletarian, whose mobility is a condition of exploitation rather than an escape from it.
- Distress is class-differentiated. NCRB data for 2023 record 10,786 suicides in the farming sector — 4,690 farmers and 6,096 agricultural labourers, 6.3% of all suicides, with Maharashtra accounting for about 38%. That labourers now outnumber cultivators in this count is itself the finding.
- A globally aware propertied peasantry. The same forces produced an articulate surplus-selling class that read the 2020 farm laws as corporate capture and forced the Farm Laws Repeal Act, 2021, returning in February 2024 to demand a legal MSP guarantee — and obtaining only a five-year procurement offer for pulses and maize.
Theoretical situating
A. R. Desai read agrarian change as the capitalist transformation of a colonial-feudal economy, with the state protecting propertied classes; the post-1991 state fits that reading. Utsa Patnaik restates the agrarian question for the global era: liberalisation compels a shift from food to export crops, so accumulation proceeds through price and trade rather than through rent. Barbara Harriss-White (India Working, 2003) supplies the missing sociology — the market is not an impersonal mechanism but is socially regulated by caste, kinship, gender and locality, which is why globalisation strengthened the local dominant classes who already controlled trade, credit and transport.
Conclusion
Globalisation did not create a rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat in the classical sense. It produced a thin capitalised stratum, a vast squeezed smallholding mass and a wage-dependent base — a new agrarian question in which the cultivator’s adversary is no longer the zamindar but the terms of trade.