Identify different forms of inequalities associated with agrarian social structure in India. (2024)
André Béteille, in Studies in Agrarian Social Structure (1974), insisted that the agrarian order be read along three separate axes — ownership, control and use of land — because title, decision and labour no longer lie in the same hands. Read with the caste–class–power framework of Caste, Class and Power (1965), Indian agrarian inequality is not one hierarchy but several overlapping ones, and the question asks us to name them as distinct forms.
Inequality in the ownership of land
Land is the founding asset and the most unequally held. The Agriculture Census 2015-16 records small and marginal holdings as 86.08 per cent of all holdings but only 46.94 per cent of operated area, while average holding size fell from 2.28 hectares in 1970-71 to 1.08 hectares. At the base sits a large stratum owning nothing beyond a homestead. Béteille’s point in Inequality among Men (1977) applies: this is not natural but socially constituted inequality, produced by inheritance and law.
Inequality between ownership and operational control
Title and cultivation have separated. Tenancy survives, but as oral, concealed and unrecorded leasing after tenancy legislation drove it underground, so the actual tiller has neither institutional credit nor crop insurance. Alongside it runs reverse tenancy, where marginal owners lease out to larger cultivators with machinery. A second inequality therefore sits inside the first: between those who own and those who decide.
Inequality in access to the means of production
Wolf Ladejinsky’s formula that Green Revolution technology was scale-neutral but not resource-neutral still holds. Irrigation coverage rose only from 49.3 to 55 per cent of gross cropped area between 2015-16 and 2020-21 (Economic Survey 2024-25), leaving nearly half of cropped India rainfed. Unequal access to credit, tubewells, tractors, extension and assured procurement converts a prior endowment into a permanent advantage.
Inequality in labour relations and wages
Daniel Thorner‘s mazdoor is now differentiated. Attached labour has decayed into what Jan Breman (Footloose Labour, 1996) calls neo-bondage — contractor-mediated debt without the old patron’s obligations. Wage inequality is also gendered: average daily agricultural wages were about ₹348 for men against ₹276 for women (2019-20, Agricultural Wages in India), for work of comparable arduousness.
Caste, gender and region
- Caste: the land hierarchy still maps onto the ritual one, Dalits concentrated among labourers. Béteille’s finding is that inequality has moved from cumulative to dispersed, not that it has ended.
- Gender: women do a large and rising share of field operations, yet held only 13.96 per cent of operational holdings and 11.72 per cent of operated area (Agriculture Census 2015-16). Without title they fall outside the definition of “farmer” that credit, insurance, procurement and extension use, so the feminisation of agricultural work has not been matched by any transfer of assets or entitlement.
- Region and voice: irrigated Punjab–Haryana against rainfed eastern and central India; and the price-and-subsidy agenda of organised farmers drowns out the wage-and-dignity agenda of labourers.
Conclusion
These forms are not additive but interlocking: ownership determines input access, input access determines surplus, surplus buys political voice, and caste supplies the idiom that legitimises the whole. Any policy that attacks one axis alone — land, wages or credit — leaves the structure intact.