Write short note: Inequality in the agrarian structure (1985)
Agrarian inequality in India is remarkable less for its extent than for its durability across generations. Gunnar Myrdal‘s principle of circular cumulative causation explains why: in a system without countervailing force, an initial advantage in land, credit or status sets off changes that deepen it, so positions harden instead of converging. The sociological task is therefore to identify the mechanisms of reproduction, not merely to list the disparities.
The interlocked market
Amit Bhaduri‘s model of semi-feudalism (1973), built from eastern India, is the sharpest statement of the mechanism. Four features lock together: sharecropping, the tenant’s perpetual indebtedness, the same person acting as landlord, employer and creditor, and the tenant’s lack of direct market access. Because the landlord’s return depends on the tenant staying poor, he actively resists productivity-raising innovation. Backwardness here is not cultural lag but a rational outcome of interlocked markets — the single most powerful explanation of agrarian stagnation offered by Indian scholarship.
How advantage and disadvantage are transmitted
- Inheritance and fragmentation: partible inheritance splits already small plots each generation, pushing households below viability while large holdings are preserved through partition on paper.
- Debt and distress sale: the NSS Situation Assessment Survey (2019) found 50.2 per cent of agricultural households indebted, with an average outstanding loan of ₹74,121. Where formal credit is unavailable the informal lender’s terms convert a bad season into a permanent loss of land.
- The endogamous marriage market: caste endogamy keeps land, dowry and social capital circulating within the same stratum, so marriage functions as a device of class closure in the sense Frank Parkin described.
- Exclusion of women from title: women hold under 14 per cent of operational holdings (Agriculture Census 2015-16). The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, reinforced by Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (Supreme Court, 11 August 2020), makes daughters coparceners by birth; Bina Agarwal shows why entitlement is seldom converted into possession when the claim must be pressed against brothers.
- Elite capture of local institutions: Daniel Thorner found cooperatives captured by the well-to-do, and S. C. Dube found the Community Development Programme’s “felt needs” to be the officials’ needs, its benefits flowing to the already connected. Irrigation, subsidised inputs and scheme selection follow the same channel.
Unequal exits
Education, salaried employment and migration allow some households to leave the structure; for others, mobility is itself exploitation — Jan Breman‘s footloose labour is mobile because it is unprotected. The human cost is starkly ordered: of 10,786 suicides in the agricultural sector recorded by NCRB in 2023, 6,096 were agricultural labourers against 4,690 cultivators. Those with least land die in the greatest numbers, yet public attention attaches to the farmer.
Conclusion
Policy has broken exactly one link decisively — the landlord’s monopoly as sole employer and creditor, loosened by bank nationalisation, minimum wage law and above all a statutory employment guarantee that supplies an alternative wage. Ceilings, tenancy reform and women’s inheritance have not been enforced comparably. Agrarian inequality persists not because it was never legislated against, but because legislation attacked its distribution while leaving its mechanisms intact.