After centuries of a continued existence, to ask this question seems to be both cheeky as well as a tautology.
But even though the Vedic Ages, the Mauryan and Gupta Empires, the Chola and Mughal Empires, after the East India Company and the Lat Sahab’s pretty elaborate legal/administrative systems, with villages and their environment(s) having socially got structured, this question still remains largely unaddressed.
For example, when owner-cultivators and big landlords gang up to demand a mandatory status for MSP, it is called a farmers movement. Even though they constitute less than 10% of the rural populace.
When the All India Kisan Sabha and such other poor peoples’ unions strive to defend, protect, and even agitate for the landless and marginal farmers, who constitute one-half of the rural populace, it is not held to be a farmer’s movement.
When jobless, wageless, landless villagers move out to build roads and bridges, no one says they are farmers on the run!
In a nutshell, two-thirds of the rural populace have little or no land. But they are the ones who till and cultivate for the landed. Again, a fifth of the villagers do have land and do produce for their family consumption, but they do not have any surplus to sell. And some of the landless also are craftspeople, whose traditionally manufactured products don’t sell any more to sustain them.
In a way, thus, nine out of every ten villagers are traditionally land tillers/workers, but not really part of any village-based rights bodies. And a good third of this 90% are Dalits and tribals, with no land at all, and no meaningful rights too, except the constitutional right to vote.
The point is we must go beyond the old debate of village vs towns. Because within each village, there are multiple-layered strata that calls out for diverse attention and multi-remedies.
The village is not a cohesive unit. Villagers are pitted against each other as well as against the wider, urban jungle. There is no one-size-fits-all problem or solution.
VillageNama aims to continue and enrich this discussion, so that a multi-layered answer is obtained to such multi-layered questions
Alok Sinha, a TV news panelist and presently our Chief Contents Officer, spent more than two decades in the rural sector during his 35 years in the IAS.
