agrarian changes in the times of neoliberal crises

REVIEW OF RURAL AFFAIRS

Economic & Political Weekly Supplement EPW june 30, 2012 vol xlviI nos 26 & 27 5

Agrarian Changes in the Times of (Neo-liberal) ‘Crises’Revisiting Attached Labour in Haryana

Surinder S Jodhka

Over the last two decades or so the dominant mode of

talking about Indian agriculture has been that of “crisis”.

Commentators and scholars have tended to attribute

this crisis of the agrarian economy to larger processes at

work, particularly to globalisation and the new policies

of economic reforms initiated by India during the early

years of the 1990s. While there may be some truth in

these explanations, the framing of the “agrarian”, “rural”

question in this discourse presents the complex and

diverse rural realities in simplistic and populist terms.

Such a discourse also invokes a sectoral policy response,

where agriculture as a sector is seen as needing state

attention, and ignores the internal dynamics of changing

caste and class relations on the ground. Based on a

revisit to two villages of Haryana, this paper provides a

brief account of the changing nature of class relations

in a post-green revolution rural setting with a specific

focus on the changing nature of attached and

“unfree” labour.

The paper draws heavily from the background paper I prepared for the World Bank study on Poverty and Social Exclusion (2011). I am grateful to Maitreyi Das for her support and inputs. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the department of sociology, University of Delhi and at a seminar at the University of Oxford organised by Alpa Shah and Barbara Harriss-White. I am also grateful to Sneha Sudha Komath and Ujithra Ponniah for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply.

Surinder S Jodhka ([email protected]) is with the department of social systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Introduction

The success of green revolution technology during the 1960s and 1970s, though confi ned only to some pockets of India, was an important turning point in the develop-

ment history of India. Its implications were not confi ned to economic growth. It transformed rural social relations and traditional authority structures. The face of the Indian country-side in the green revolution pockets changed very rapidly. In terms of social groups, the most visible benefi ciaries of this change were the substantial landowners from the locally dominant caste groups, who had traditionally been landowners and cultivators. The locally dominant castes consolidated their position in the regional power structure and acquired a new sense of confi -dence. The rise of dominant caste farmers in the 1970s also set in motion a phase of populist politics at the regional and na-tional levels. The newly emerged agrarian elite farmer did not speak only for his own caste or class. He spoke on behalf of the entire village. His identifi cation with the village was not just political or that of a representative of a section of the village. He saw himself to be the natural spokesperson of the village.

However, this excitement about the green revolution and modernisation of Indian agriculture did not last for too long. By the mid-1980s, the Indian countryside began to show a new kind of restiveness; this was particularly pronounced in the pockets that had experienced the green revolution. The sur-plus producing farmers began to mobilise themselves into un-ions demanding subsidies on farm inputs and higher prices for their produce. The market economy, they argued, was inher-ently against the farm sector and favoured the urban industry and the middle class consumer. Given the unequal power rela-tions between the town and countryside, they argued, the agricultural sector suffered from unequal terms of trade, the evidence of which could be seen in the growth of indebtedness among the cultivating/farming classes.

Farmers mobilised themselves in different parts of India quite successfully for over a decade. The farmers’ movements of the 1980s also signalled the rise of a new mobile social category of rural people. They had prospered with the green revolution, which had also brought them close to the market economy. Though they spoke for agrarian interests, they as-pired to go beyond the village. The agrarian economy could not satisfy their aspirations for social and cultural mobility. They were quick to move from their local seats of power to


june 30, 2012 vol xlviI nos 26 & 27 EPW Economic & Political Weekly Supplement6

legislative assemblies in the state capitals. The surplus they generated from agriculture went into education, urban trade and other non-agricultural activities (Upadhya 1988; Rutten 1995; Omvedt 1992; Harriss-White 1996). By the early 1980s, the social profi le of this class had begun to change. The follow-ing lines of Balagopal provide a lucid account of this process of growing diversifi cation:

…a typical family of this class has a landholding in its native village, cultivated by hired labour, bataidar, tenant or farm servants and supervised by the father or one son; business of various descriptions in town managed by other sons; and per haps a young and bright child who is a doctor or engineer or a professor. It is this class that is most vocal about injustice done to the village (Balagopal 1987:1545).

It was around this time when agrarian issues had been intensely worked on by the social scientists for nearly a decade and a half and had become politically sensitive that I initiated my doctoral research on rural indebtedness and the changing nature of debt-dependencies in rural Haryana. I selected Karnal district for my fi eld study. Karnal had been a successful Intensive Area Development Programme (IADP) district and was a typical representative of the prosperous agrarian land-scape of north-west India. Keeping various sociological and metho dological variables in mind, I chose three villages of Panipat tehsil for my fi eldwork (Panipat later became a sepa-rate district of Haryana). I began my fi eldwork in March 1988 and completed it by the middle of 1989. In terms of research questions, I looked at the different dimensions of credit and debt relations and how they institutionalised dependency rela-tions among different social classes/categories engaged in agriculture. Given that my work was in the post-green revolu-tion period in an active green revolution pocket, my obvious focus was on the processes of change.

Though Indian social scientists had intensely debated the emerging nature of production relations in Indian agriculture in the famous “mode of production debate” during the 1970s and early 1980s, micro and specifi c dimensions of change were still being studied and debated. The question of debt- dependency and unfree labour was one such question. Since the middle of the 1970s, eradication of “bonded labour” had also been a policy concern with the Indian state as well as glo-bal agencies like the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Agricultural Sustainability Institute (ASI).

The shift in India’s economic orientation during the early years of the 1990s had several implications for the agricultural sector. Apart from other things, it marginalised agriculture in the development discourse on India. Social science research on the rural and agrarian economy also declined. Agrarian questions no longer generated excitement in university semi-nars, or in the popular media.

By the early years of the 21st century a new discourse on Indian agriculture began to take shape. The preoccupation this time was with “crisis”, manifestations of which were clearly visible in the tragic rise of farmers’ suicides in different pockets of India. While the Indian economy was growing at a fast pace, the agricultural sector was experiencing stagnation. The relative share of the agricultural sector in the national econ-omy began to decline steadily. Interestingly, in this new

discourse of “crisis of agriculture” only occasionally were any references made to internal inequalities in agrarian India, even by those who swore by the political economy framework and had participated in the debate on agrarian class relations and mode of production. Unlike the 1970s and 1980s very little empirical research was being done on the internal dynamics of the political economy of agriculture. Most formulations also seemed to be emerging from the analysis of journalistic reports, or the large data sets pro-duced by offi cial agencies, such as the National Sample Survey Offi ce (NSSO).

Given this context, I revisited two of my three study villages during 2008-09, 20 years after my fi rst fi eldwork, with some “old” and some “new” questions. The new questions related to the nature of change in relation to castes and communities in the villages. The old questions were to explore the political economy of agrarian change during this period. One of these was the question of unfree and attached labour.

The Two Villages

The two villages selected for the study represent a particular type of rural setting, which is becoming increasingly common in different parts of the third world. These are villages that are actively connected to urban centres and are being changed very rapidly by technology and industrialisation. Though the two study villages are still suffi ciently far from urban centres, to be treated as urban peripheries, they are certainly not eco-nomically “backward” or socially and culturally “traditional”. The distance that the two villages have from the main towns in the region and the diverse sets of communities they are in-habited by also make them worth comparing, interestingly, similar and different from each other. Of the two study vil-lages, Village-I is located at a distance of around 9 km from the town of Panipat and the other (Village-II) around 16 km away. Both are multi-caste villages with diverse caste communities living within the villages and both experienced the green revolution during the 1970s.

Equally important for understanding their development has been the growing shadow of industry over the two villages. It was around the mid-1970s that the Government of Haryana decided to set up a thermal power station close to Panipat. Some of the farmers from Village-I lost a part of their agricul-tural land to the power project. However, it did not directly affect the agrarian economy of the village very much. The vil-lagers whose land was acquired were considered for jobs in the thermal power station and some of them managed to get regu-lar employment in the plant. It also generated a lot of new em-ployment for casual labour. Over the years, the plant and the town have been expanding and new industries have also been developing in the area.

We are grateful to the advisory group of the Review of Rural Affairs for putting together this issue.The members of the advisory group are Ramesh Chand, Surinder S Jodhka, D Narasimha Reddy and P S Vijayshankar.



Social Life and Economic RelationsUntil some time back, Indian rural life was almost completely identifi ed with agriculture and activities that supported agri-culture. Though there were a large number of households that never owned land, they too largely depended on agriculture for their livelihood. They either worked as casual/attached labourers with the cultivators or provided other supporting services to the cultivators. Mediated through the institution of caste, rural society of Haryana had a system of patron-client relations within which the agrarian economy was socially organised.

This system of jajmani ties had begun to weaken with the introduction of commercial agriculture during the colonial period (Bhattacharya 1985) and had nearly completely disinte-grated by the 1980s. However, 20 years back, the two villages still had a predominantly agrarian character. Agriculture was at the centre of rural social life. It provided employment to a majority of the working population of the village and gave them their primary identity. Cultivating farmers were at the centre stage of village life. Poor dalits and other landless vil-lagers looked up to them for employment, and occasionally for credit. Through credit, the richer farmers tied the labouring poor for work on land and at home, with the cattle. Those who owned big plots of land also controlled political institutions and commanded respect and authority in the village.

This has almost completely changed. The change was more visible in Village-I than it was in Village-II, but the pattern was exactly the same. Less than 30% of all households identifi ed cultivation as their primary occupation. This was even lesser in Village-I (23%). As is evident from Table 1, the largest pro-portion of the households is in the category of labourers. How-ever, they are not necessarily agricultural labourers. In fact, a large majority of them earn their livelihood from working out-side the agricultural sector and only occasionally work on land.

The number of people with employment outside the village in the form of regular jobs in the formal sector of the economy (17.2%) is also quite signifi cant. This becomes particularly interesting when we see it in relation to caste.

However, landownership and cultivation continue to be the prerogative of the “dominant” and “upper” castes in the two villages. Nearly 92% of all the cultivators were from these caste communities. In contrast, more than 80% of those who reported their primary occupation as labourers were either dalits or were from “backward castes” (BCs). Occupationally, diversifi cation had occurred among all the caste groups. As is evident from Table 2, a good proportion of households in each category had primary occupations outside agriculture. Interestingly, pro-portionately speaking, the number of dalits with regular jobs

is the highest, and it the lowest for the BCs. Though both cate-gories have been poor and lacking in social and cultural capital required for securing a regular job, dalits have been able to get these jobs because of the statutory quotas in education and employment made available to them by state policies.

Apart from the economic activity, the number of working members in a household also determined the social and economic well-being of a household (Table 3). Notably, nearly half of our respondent households had more than one full-time working member and in some cases the number of working members was as high as fi ve. Further, the pattern was almost the same across caste groups. There were also some house-holds where there was no full-time working member.

An important aspect of this was the fact that in most cases, different members of the household were invariably employed in different occupations, refl ecting a process of occupational diversifi cation and differentiation within the household. The households in rural Haryana are increasingly becoming pluri-active (Lindberg 2005; Jodhka 2006). For example, apart from the reported primary occupation, more than 15% (152) of the respondents also reported having a formal secondary occupa-tion either within the village or outside. In most cases the sec-ondary occupation was a small business, either some kind of shop within the village, or outside, in the neighbouring village.

A striking change that had occurred in the two villages over the last two decades was a manifold expansion of the local

market. Twenty years back the number of shops in each of the villages was around 15 to 20 and most of them were grocery shops which provided almost everything the villagers needed for their daily consumption. Most of these shops were owned and run by the local Banias or the Punjabi Aroras. This had changed signifi cantly over the years. The number of shops in Village-I was 78 and in Village-II was 64.

Table 1: Primary Occupation of the Respondent Households (2008-09)Primary Occupation Village-I Village-II Total

Cultivators 117 (23.26) 172 (35.03) 289 (29.07)

Labourers 206 (40.9) 153 (31.16) 359 (36.11)

Shopkeepers/business 39 (07.75) 45 (09.16) 84 (08.45)

Regular service/government job 108 (21.4) 63 (12.8) 171 (17.20)

No clear arrangement 33 (06.55) 58 (11.8) 91 (09.15)

Total 503 (100) 491 (100) 994 (100)Percentages are presented in parenthesis. All the tables are based on the author’s primary survey.

Table 2: Caste-wise Primary Occupation of the Respondent HouseholdsCaste Cultivator/ Labourer Shopkeeper/ Regular Service/ No Total Farmer Business Government Job Regular Job

Dalit 7 106 0 51 19 183 (3.8) (57.9) (27.86) (10.38) (100)

BC 17 202 14 42 34 309 (5.5) (65.37) (4.5) (13.5) (11.0) (100)

DC 201 25 23 55 24 328 (61.28) (7.6) (7.01) (16.7) (7.31) (100)

UC 64 26 47 23 14 174 (36.78) (14.94) (27.01) (13.21) (8.04) (100)

Total 289 359 84 171 91 994 (29.07) (36.11) (8.45) (17.20) (9.15) (100)The category dalit corresponds to the local ex-untouchable communities. The category “backward castes” (BC) has been in usage in the region for a long. These are, broadly speaking, “lower” sections of the currently popular official category “OBC”. Some of the OBC (the “upper” layer, such as the landowning Gujjars) are the locally dominant caste (DC) and thus have been included in the category DC. Some “upper castes” (UC), such as brahmins, Rajput and Punjabi Aroras, have also been landowners and cultivators in the region.Percentages are presented in parenthesis.

Table 3: Number of Working Members in the Respondent Households 1 2 3 4 5 None Total

Dalit 82 65 24 5 4 3 183

BC 144 109 37 10 6 3 309

DC 162 99 40 13 6 8 328

UC 95 46 15 4 2 12 174

Total 483 319 116 32 18 26 994



In some respects there had not been much change over the last two decades in agrarian practices. Despite the growing shadow of industry over the two villages, not much land had been lost to “outsiders”. On the contrary, agricultural land had grown in size as the villagers were able to work on the banjar (fallow) land and improve it for cultivation. In Village-I, most of the panchayat land, which was previously lying fallow, had been encroached upon by cultivators mostly from the locally dominant communities and was being regularly cultivated.

As was the practice two decades back, the two main crops in the region were still wheat and paddy. Some villagers used to also grow sugar cane, but over the years, they had stopped do-ing that. Some farmers also grew a third crop in the form of peas or lentils. The use of fertilisers and pesticides continued to grow. Farmers had almost completely stopped producing seeds for cultivation and depended entirely on the market for the supply of hybrid seeds. For their irrigational needs they depended on the canal water and tube wells. Though, unlike in some other parts of the green revolution areas of the north-west, the water table had not gone down much in the region, farmers had installed tube wells using a new technology, the submersible pumps. This was more expensive, but provided a better supply of water.

The mechanisation process that began with green revolu-tion technology has continued to grow. Though a large number of farmers had tractors during the late 1980s, a good number of villagers also kept bullocks. In fact, 20 years back I came across some cases where the relatively smaller farmers, after working with a tractor for some time, had gone back to farm-ing using bullocks, fi nding it more economical for their size of holdings. This was no longer the case. There were no bullocks in the two villages. The small and marginal farmers, who could not afford to buy tractors, hired tractors for ploughing. The use of combine harvesters had increased signifi cantly, replacing the threshers for harvesting of wheat. Previously, there was some resistance to the use of combine harvesters because they only picked up the seed and left the plant on the fi eld, a useful source for cattle fodder. Threshing machines, on the other hand, were preferred because they also processed the plant and converted it into hay (used for cattle fodder). However, the arrival of a new machine called the reaper had, to an extent, solved this problem. It plucked the plant left behind by the combine harvester and processed it into hay.

Mechanical harvesting machines were available for paddy as well, but they did not work very well for the longer plant of basmati rice, which was popular with most of the farmers in the two villages. One of the implications, and perhaps also a reason, for this second phase of mechanisation was a steady decline of demand for human labour in agriculture, a subject I elaborate on later.

Landholdings and Agrarian Social Structure

Despite the declining signifi cance of agriculture in national life, agriculture continues to employ the largest number of working Indians. Though this holds good for the two villages, there is

clearly a declining trend in the number of people working on land.

As mentioned above, less than 30% of the households in the two villages reported agriculture or farming as their primary occupation. Also there were signifi cant disparities in the land-ownership patterns. As evident from Table 4, below 66% of the households in Village-I and 48% in Village-II reported owning no land at all. On the other hand, a small number of house-holds owned large plots of land.

When seen in relation to caste, this picture of disparity becomes even more signifi cant. Despite many radical changes in rural social life over the last century or so, the agrarian economy of the village remains almost exclusively under the control of the dominant and upper castes, those who have traditionally been the landowning and agrarian communities. As is evident from Table 5 nearly 95% of the dalits and BCs were completely landless. On the contrary, only around 12% of the dominant caste households were landless.

However, there have been very important changes in the agrarian social structure, both in terms of relations across caste groups and class categories, as also in the attitudes of the landowners towards their occupational callings.

Attached Labour Then and Now

Most of my doctoral work was published in the Economic & Political Weekly (Jodhka 1994, 1995a, 1995b, 1995c, 1996). The fi rst paper I published was on the changing nature of debt dependencies in relation to the various forms of labour rela-tions. My specifi c focus was on the changing patterns of attached labour. Social science literature had looked at the phenomenon of attached labour in post-green revolution agriculture from several different perspectives. There were many who believed that with modernisation and the develop-ment of capitalism in agriculture, all forms of traditional

Table 4: Patterns of Landownership in the Two Study Villages No Less than 2-5 5-10 10-25 25-50 50+ No Total Land Two Acre Acres Acres Acres Acres Acres Response

Village-I 333 25 101 30 7 5 1 1 503 (66.2) (4.97) (20.1) (5.96) (1.39) (0.99) (0.19) (0.19) (100)

Village-II 235 36 130 50 30 7 2 1 491 (47.9) (7.33) (26.5) (10.2) (6.10) (1.42) (0.40) (0.20) (100)

Total 568 61 231 80 37 12 3 2 994 (57.1) (6.13) (23.2) (8.04) (3.72) (1.20) (0.30) (0.20) (100)The number of farming households owning and cultivating more than 10 acres of land appears to be under-reported for the obvious reasons.Percentages are presented in parenthesis.

Table 5: Landownership Patterns across Caste Groups No <1 2-5 5-10 10-25 25-50 50+ No Total Land Acre Acres Acres Acres Acres Acres Response

Dalit 174 2 6 0 0 0 0 1 183 (95.08) (1.09) (3.28) (0.55) (100)

BC 293 4 9 3 0 0 0 0 309 (94.82) (1.29) (2.91) (0.97) (100)

DC 39 27 156 61 35 7 2 1 328 (11.89) (8.23) (47.56) (18.6) (10.67) (2.13) (0.60) (0.3) (100)

UC 62 28 60 16 2 5 1 0 174 (35.63) (16.09) (34.48) (9.19) (1.14) (2.87) (0.6) (100)

Total 568 61 231 80 37 12 3 2 994 (57.14) (6.13) (23.24) (8.05) (3.72) (1.21) (0.3) (0.2) (100)Percentages are presented in parenthesis.



structures and dependency relations would disappear. Jan Breman had described this as a process of de-patronisation where labourers were not only freed from traditional ties, but they also lost the security of patronage they had earlier en-joyed (Breman 1974).

Some others looked at it as a process of formalisation or casualisation of labour. However, empirical research showed that attached labour not only did not disappear from green revolution pockets, but in some cases it actually became more pronounced, albeit in different forms. Similarly, the pheno-menon was also interpreted differently. T J Byres, for example, did not fi nd anything wrong with it and argued that this form of labour only fulfi lled the changing demands of the new agrarian economy, and could work as a means of differentiat-ing labour. Attached labour, he speculated, would be required when greater mechanisation would reduce the need for employing casual labour, and, instead, the capitalist farmer would prefer “one attached labourer, who would be paid a regular and probably high wage and who would be trained to look after the mechanical implement”. This “privileged class of attached labour”, he expected, would also get to participate in the prosperity of the “green revolution” (1972: 105-09). Several years later, Rudra made a similar argument when he compared the semi-attached labour employed by the capitalist farmers of West Bengal with the regular employees of the organised sector (Rudra 1990).

Another set of scholars saw it as a form of unfreedom. Attached labour was for them a form of bondage and slavery. Amit Bhaduri, for example, saw in it an evidence of continuity of pre-capitalist relations of production even in the green revo-lution pockets of India (Bhaduri 1984). Some others, such as Tom Brass, underlined the point that their presence in post-green revolution agriculture was simply evidence of the fact that capitalism could be pretty comfortable with slave labour as long as it helped in wealth accumulation. He argued that the employer farmers in post-green revolution Haryana acti-vely worked towards decomposing labour through the mecha-nism of debt using short- and long-term labour-tying arrange-ments, which amounted to a process of what he described as “deproletarianisation” (Brass 1990).

Attached labour, indeed, existed in my study villages, though the form and content of the relationship had changed substantially and had become quite formalised, a point that had also been made earlier by Shiela Bhalla (1976). The attached labourers rarely saw themselves as being a “privi-leged class” or as “permanent employees” of the organised sec-tor. Elements of unfreedom were also present in their relation-ship with the farmers. However, I did not agree fully with Brass on his conceptualisation of attached labour as a form of slavery, or that labour-tying was a growing phenomenon, a process of deproletarianisation as he described it. In fact, the overall change in the social framework of agricultural produc-tion had opened up several choices for the labouring classes. There were many cases where, after working as attached labourers for some time the labourers had been able to move out of the relationship.

The growing integration of the village with the broader market economy and the increasing availability of alternative sources of employment outside agriculture along with the changing political and ideological environment had weakened the hold of the landowner over the labourers. Labourers intensely disliked working in an attached relationship and chose to work only when they were in dire need of a relatively large amount of cash and had no other source of mobilising credit. They also tried to come out of the relationship as soon as they could. Dislike for the relationship by labourers often resulted in instances of violence and confl ict with employers. Thanks to all these factors, and contrary to Brass’s assertion, the numbers of those willing to work on annual contracts seemed to be declining in the villages.

Even when they could not come out of the attached relation-ship, they kept changing their employers by transferring their debts after every year or two of working with one farmer. Given the shortage of those willing to work as attached labou-rers, it was not diffi cult for them to fi nd a substitute employer who was willing to advance enough money required for clear-ing the outstanding debt with the previous farmer. There were some who simply ran away with the outstanding debt to the employer farmers, and the farmers could not do much to get them back or recover the advances. Recognising the signifi -cance of all these processes and their infl uence on relations on ground I conceptualised the existing forms of attached labour as a system of “labour mortgage”, an unfree relationship but internally fragmented and frequently contested in nature (Jodhka 1994).

In several of his responses to my 1994 EPW paper, Tom Brass vehemently contested my claim and restated his argument that even my data showed that there was a process of deproletaria-nisation underway in Haryana agriculture (Brass 1995, 1996).

Twenty Years Later

What was the nature and extent of attached labour in the two villages 20 years later? As I proceeded with my fi eldwork, it was not very diffi cult to conclude that Brass had, indeed, over-stated his argument about the process of deproletarianisation.

As I showed through my publications based on the earlier fi eldwork, by the late 1980s, agrarian relations in these villages had already changed quite radically. Farmers no longer gave their land on lease to tenants on a long-term basis. Their relationship with attached labourers had also become completely formalised (Bhalla 1976; Jodhka 1994). Most of the labour needs of the farmers were fulfi lled by casual and con-tractual labour, mostly on a fi xed cash rate. Though a good amount of peak season work was done by the migrant labour from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, local dalits and other landless labourers also worked on farms. Most of the middle and big farmers, who owned more than 10 or 15 acres of land, also em-ployed attached labourers. Some of the big farmers employed up to fi ve attached labourers. With exceptions of one or two, all attached labourers came from the same village. Only the locals could be trusted with an advance wage. Each of the villages had around 70 to 75 persons working as attached labourers.



Though the mechanisation process was a part and parcel of the green revolution technology, in its initial phase it did not lead to labour displacement. In fact, demand for labour went up considerably with the new agrarian technology making it possible to intensify cropping patterns and substantially expand land under cultivation. Thus, even when labour came from outside during the peak harvesting and sowing seasons, local labour also had enough work available on the farm.

Decline in Demand for Labour

This has changed considerably over the past 20 years. First and foremost, there has been a signifi cant decline in the demand for labour over the years, mainly because of the second phase of mechanisation. The number of tractors in these villages has continued to grow. There are now 72 trac-tors in Village-I and nearly 90 in Village-II. All the ploughing work in the village is done mechanically. The wheat harvest-ing season, which used to go on for over a month, has come down to a mere fortnight. The combine harvesters have com-pletely revolutionised the process of harvesting. The threshers that were earlier used had also reduced harvesting time, but they still needed a lot of labour. The combine harvesters cut down on labour signifi cantly. Sowing of crops is becoming mechanised. Twenty years ago, paddy transplantation and its harvesting used to be the most labour-intensive work in the two villages and provided employment to a large number of people for a good number of days. This is no longer the case. Except for the transplantation of the basmati plant, everything could be done mechanically. Even weeding is increasingly done mechanically or chemically.

The decline has not only been on the demand-side. The sup-ply of labour has also shrunk. Even though they continue to be landless, dalits no longer like working as labourers in the farms. As I have shown through my earlier work in Punjab vil-lages, dalits did not wish to work on land with cultivating farmers primarily for social and political reasons (Jodhka 2002). Working with farmers implied accepting their domination and power. By refusing to work on land, dalits expressed their dis-sent against the traditional structure of patron-client ties. Even if it meant cycling down to the town for casual labour at no higher a wage or more secure income, a dalit would refuse to work on land. Some of them also told me that the work on farm was much more demanding and one had to invariably work for more than eight hours in a day on the farm and put up with abuses by the farmer.

This distancing of dalits from the agrarian economy had, of course, been made possible by the availability of alternative sources of employment in the industries and informal econ-omy in the nearby urban centres.

Dalits have also been consolidating themselves as com-munities or political blocks. As mentioned above, some of them could secure regular jobs in the government sector, thanks largely to the caste-based quotas. This would have obviously decreased their dependence for short-term credit on the local cultivating farmers. In contrast, the economic position of those from landless BCs seemed more vulnerable.

They also worked as wage and attached labourers with the local farmers.

Though the two villages still have attached labourers, mostly employed by big farmers, none of them is from a local dalit caste. The total number of attached labourers in the two villages has declined considerably. This is particularly so in Village-II, where only four or fi ve farmers employ such labourers. The total number of attached labourers in the village would be around 10 to 15. Two decades back this fi gure was around 70. Their number is a little higher in Village-I, around 25 to 30. Most of them are employed by big Punjabi farmers. The Gujjar farmers no longer hire attached labourers, primarily because of the size of their holdings.

The form of contracts for their hiring has not changed much. They are generally hired in the month of June and farmers pay the annual wage in advance. In some cases when the labourer has to clear an outstanding debt with another farmer, the farmers have to pay them more than the annual wage. Though there were two cases in Village-II, where labourers are hired on a monthly basis, the contract is mostly annual.

However, there are many substantive changes. Most of the attached labourers are outsiders, though not migrants from far-off districts of Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. They are invariably from neighbouring districts of Haryana and generally have a relative living in the village. This has some implications for the contract signed between the labourer and the farmer. In place of the earlier practice of asking the local bigwig (Bhalla 1976) to be a witness, now only the local relative signed as a witness.

The employer farmers do not like to expose their attached labourers to a social science researcher from outside for the fear of them being reported as bonded labourer. Apart from the police/court case that the farmer may have to deal with, he also fears losing the advance wage paid to the worker. It was only after repeated attempts that I was able to interview 14 labourers.

As was the case 20 years ago, the attached labourers still disliked being attached and in most cases chose to be attached labourers out of compulsion, mostly due to a need for credit. One of them almost repeated verbatim what I was told by a respondent 20 years back:

…. As an attached labourer one has to put up with the farmer like a married woman (beer) has to with her husband. You have to listen to his commands all the time. There is no choice!

The annual earnings from wage work have obviously gone up, from around Rs 5,000 to around Rs 20,000. Depending on age and physical health, a labourer is normally paid anything between Rs 18,000 and Rs 22,000 for a year-long contract. In addition to the cash wage, the labourer is also given a fi xed amount of wheat, and if he is an outsider a place to stay. They work all seven days of the week but are entitled to 12 days of leave in a year. If they absent themselves beyond 12 days they have to provide a replacement, or the farmer adds the wage of a casual labourer to the outstanding debt.

Why has the incidence of attached labour declined over the years? There are several interrelated processes that have brought this change about. First, over the last two decades,



holdings have become smaller, primarily because of subdivi-sions within families. Many farms that earlier required the services of a regular labourer no longer need it. Farmers could manage smaller holdings with their family labour, and by hiring casual labour as and when required. Keeping a regular farm servant also made farming unviable for such households. One of the more enterprising farmer said, “Why should I keep an attached labourer when I can get casual labourer as and when I need”?

The second related process is the growing diffi culty in get-ting attached labourers. As the local labourers do not like working in such arrangements, attached labourers invariably have to be imported from the neighbouring districts or states. Such labourers have to be also provided with housing and other amenities for their stay in the village. Not every farmer could afford to do so. Getting an attached labourer and providing him accommodation is not easy unless you have a substantial holding.

Finally, most of the attached labourers I interviewed in 1988-89 had started their career as palis (cattle herders) at the age of 12 or 13 and graduated to becoming regular naukars after the age of 18 or 19. This is no longer the case. With the village commons having disappeared and the number of cattle having declined considerably, palis are no longer required.

In the changed scenario, farmers have moved to alternative modes of labour hiring, through different and innovative forms of tenurial arrangements.

Alternative Modes of Labour Attachment

One of the direct implications of land reforms legislation and green revolution technology was a complete decline of the old system of tenancy relations where the tenant farmer worked on land and paid one-half or one-third share of the produce to the landowner. This gave way to capitalist farming with wage labour and machines. However, over the years this too has changed. While the land market has been rather sluggish, not all landowners are cultivating farmers.

Two sets of landowners have been moving out of direct cul-tivation. The fi rst are those left with small plots of land due to fragmentation of holdings and where the main working mem-bers either have a job outside or do not have the capacity to work on land. The second are the relatively bigger farmers who have diversifi ed into other occupations, but continue to live in the village and/or want to keep an active relationship with the land. Such landowners lease out their lands, invaria-bly to smaller enterprising landowners. In such cases, land is mostly leased out on annual cash rent, which has gone up from around Rs 13,000-14,000 to around Rs 20,000-25,000. This phenomenon has been described by some economists as “re-verse tenancy” (Brar and Gill 2002), which is a misnomer. The land is leased out not only by the big landowners to small land-owners, but also by small and marginalised landowners to other small landowners or enterprising farmers. Such farmers have to be not only enterprising, but also have suffi cient funds to pay cash to the landowner in advance for the year. They also need to have some risk-bearing capacity. A bad crop due to

poor weather or pests can mean a complete disaster. A rough estimate suggests that nearly 20 to 25% of all the land is being cultivated under such arrangements.

Another form of tenancy arrangement, which is preferred by the relatively more active landowners, is “labour share-cropping”, which appears like the traditional system tenurial attachment. Many of the middle-size farmers and some big farmers prefer leasing their lands out on a shared basis to the labouring households. Land in such cases is leased out primarily to a labourer, who works on the land along with his family and gets one-fourth of the entire yield. The labourer has to also share one-fourth of the expense, which is invariably paid by the farmer and deducted from the total yield at the end of the season. Some of these labourers are also indebted to the farm-ers whose lands they cultivate but they are not tied to the farmer like an attached labourer. The farmer though contin-uing to take interest in the farm does not have to worry about everyday work.

Who then hires attached labourer and for what reasons? And how can one conceptualise this relationship? Most of the attached labourers in the two villages are currently working with big farmers who not only have large landholdings but also have occupationally diversifi ed families. In a typical case, of a family of four or fi ve brothers, two or three work outside the village and one or two take care of the land. They are en-terprising and have invested substantially in agricultural ma-chinery. Given their economic status and changed cultural tastes, they do not participate in any kind of physical work on land unless there is no choice. They too look towards the town for a more comfortable existence. Their children study in urban schools and aspire to an urban life. They are the ones who need attached labourers the most.

What is the nature of the attached relationship today? Inter-estingly, the intense tension and confl ict between farmers and their attached labourers that I witnessed 20 years back did not seem to be evident any longer. This is primarily because most of the attached labourers working in these villages are out-siders and their dependence on the employer farmers is much more than was the case 20 years back when attached labour-ers were mostly of local origin. These labourers have also come to work in these villages out of desperation and on recommendation of some close relative. They are also very dif-ferent from the seasonal migrants who came from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar who have no kinship link with the village. As is the case with attached labourers generally, they are all indebted to their employers. Their wage rates are below the offi cially prescribed minimum wage. In other words there is certainly an element of bondage and unfreedom in the rela-tionship of attached labourers with the farmers.

Growing Disenchantments with Agriculture and Its Implications

There are other, albeit indirect, factors that infl uence agrarian relations, such as attached labour. Globalisation and the new economic policies introduced since 1990s have had their infl u-ence on the two villages.



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However, notwithstanding the intensifi cation of the neo-liberal economic policies, there is no clear indication of the classical type of capitalist development taking place where a few farmers are able to buy large plots of lands, and hire land-less proletariat (Lenin 1956). Also, there has been no move towards corporate agriculture or contract farming. Only oc-casionally are some farmers contracted to produce seeds by seed companies. But there is no sign of this emerging as a trend in the two villages. Not much land is being sold or purchased, unless it is acquired by the industry or the state. Land sales happen only when the entire family moves out and the next generation is unable to keep in touch with the village. As mentioned above, the fi rst generation of landowners who have found viable urban employment prefer leasing their land out to selling it.

Interestingly, even though there is still a strong sense of attachment to land, agriculture is no longer seen as a desirable occupation. The younger generations across caste groups dislike farming. When we asked our respondents about their preferences for agriculture as a means of livelihood for their children or grandchildren (Question: Would you like your children/grandchildren to practise cultivation?), only around 8% of our respondents answered in the affi rmative. Surpris-ingly, the responses to the question were quite similar across caste and occupational categories. Dalits and upper castes (5-6%) were the least interested in their families staying in farming but even cultivating farmers of the dominant castes (9%) did not want their children to practise agriculture. Only among the BCs, there was some desire to continue with agri culture (11%).

Interestingly, our respondents were not much opposed to living in the village. Nearly 60% of them chose their homes in the village over migrating to urban centres. In fact, many of the households, or individual members of the households who had jobs outside in the neighbouring towns, continued to live in the village. Cities are invariably seen as polluted and expensive to live in.

Not only has the social and economic organisation of the village changed, but the meaning that the village had for its residents has also undergone a complete change. Choosing to live in the village did not imply any kind of commitment to or identifi cation with the village and its ethos. The social order of caste hierarchy is a thing of past and the collective identity of village is nearly completely fragmented.

This disenchantment with village life and agrarian eco-nomy has consequences for agrarian relations. A growing dis-tance of the traditionally rich farming classes from agrarian economy also means their gradual withdrawal from the local context. This is also among the reasons for the growing trend towards leasing out of their land rather than working as farm manager with attached labourers. Mode of surplus extraction is mediated through a neo-peasant type of economic arrange-ment where the labourers work with their families and develop personal stakes in the production process.

On the other end of the class spectrum, the growing dis-tancing of dalit castes from the local agrarian economy and their growing politicisation has its own implications. Moving out of the village has been one of the core elements of the dalit political rhetoric ever since B R Ambedkar began to articulate a political programme for dalit liberation. The obvious impli-cation of such a political consolidation is a crumbling of the old framework within which social relations of production are reproduced in the local agrarian economy.

Class relations need a framework of power relations for their reproduction. As Shiela Bhalla had rightly argued, along with debt, the power of the traditional elite as “witnesses” to contractual relations between attached labourer and the em-ployer farmer enabled the latter to keep the labourers under control. None of this works any longer. The local framework of caste and power has changed. With the process of dissociation, distancing and autonomy in operation, the local power has become quite fl uid.

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agrarian changes in the times of neoliberal crises

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