‘Agrarian class structure has been undergoing changes due to modern forces.’ Critically examine. (2025)
The statement is true but loosely put. Land reform, Green Revolution technology, market integration and non-farm diversification have certainly rearranged agrarian classes. Whether they have transformed the structure is what a critical examination must test.
The change thesis and its evidence
- Rent gave way to cultivation. Zamindari abolition removed the intermediary; P. C. Joshi recorded feudalistic tenancy giving way to commercially oriented landlords and harsher lease arrangements. Daniel Thorner’s malik has largely become a farmer.
- Technology created a market-oriented proprietor. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph called them “bullock capitalists” (In Pursuit of Lakshmi, 1987) — self-employed cultivators who became a durable national demand group.
- Extreme fragmentation. Agriculture Census 2015-16: 146.45 million holdings averaging 1.08 hectares (down from 1.15), 86.08% small and marginal, operating 46.94% of the area.
- Depeasantisation of income. The NSS Situation Assessment Survey (2019) put the average agricultural household at ₹10,218 a month, of which wages (₹4,063) exceeded net crop income (₹3,798), with 50.2% indebted. The peasant is substantially a wage-worker.
- Tenancy inverted and hidden. Classical tenancy shrank; concealed tenancy persists — NSSO 2013 found 13.65% of farm households tenanting against the Agriculture Census figure of 2.39% — while reverse tenancy moves land from small owners to capitalised cultivators. The NITI Aayog Model Agricultural Land Leasing Act, 2016 sought to legalise it; adoption has been thin.
- Feminisation. Female operational holders rose from 12.79% to 13.96% between 2010-11 and 2015-16; women cultivate while men hold title and exit to non-farm work.
- Political recomposition. The repeal of the three farm laws (2021) and the agitation from February 2024 for a legal MSP show a surplus-selling propertied peasantry, not the landless, as the dominant agrarian class.
The critical examination
First, one national scheme does not fit. D. N. Dhanagare held that the relations among classes and the social composition of those occupying positions of land control are so diverse that no general scheme can incorporate them. Punjab’s mechanised wheat belt, Bihar’s sharecropping and Kerala’s post-1969 smallholding are different structures, not stages of one sequence.
Second, the character of the change is contested. The modes of production debate was never settled. Ashok Rudra and his co-authors (1969) surveyed Punjab’s big farmers and concluded that capitalist criteria were not met even in the Green Revolution heartland. Utsa Patnaik replied that the test lies in production relations, not market involvement, and built a labour-exploitation criterion (“Class Differentiation within the Peasantry”, 1976). Amit Bhaduri’s semi-feudalism (1973) showed an eastern Indian landlord-cum-moneylender with a rational interest in blocking innovation. Alice Thorner’s review, “Semi-Feudalism or Capitalism?” (1982), maps a controversy that closed in coexistence rather than verdict.
Third, differentiation did not produce polarisation. Marxist analysis expected the peasantry to split into a rural bourgeoisie and a proletariat. Instead the middle cultivator swelled and remains the largest segment: change without the predicted direction.
Fourth, caste persists at the base. The landless labourer is still disproportionately Dalit and Adivasi. Jan Breman showed that the decay of the hali system produced not freedom but neo-bondage through contractor advances. Modern forces changed the form of unfreedom, not its incidence.
Fifth, the direction is not even one-way. Agriculture’s employment share rose from 42.5% (2018-19) to 46.1% (2023-24) before falling to 43.0% in 2025 (PLFS) — a transition that stalled and reversed, which no linear modernisation account predicts.
Conclusion
Modern forces have altered agrarian classes: rent has given way to profit and wages, holdings have fragmented, political weight has moved to the middle proprietor. They have not levelled the structure or dissolved its caste floor. Yogendra Singh was right that one process produced embourgeoisement for a few and proletarianisation for many — recomposition without levelling.