Change itself is a term of dynamism. And much depends on how we define change, and view change. Caste equations and land holdings have a mutually interacting relationship. How much, then, have both changed in villages in the country? And how much influence do they still have on the lifestyles of villagers?
Apart from the age-old factors of land holdings and caste stratification, what else has been changing in the Indian rural scenario?
For example, does the epithet “living together separately” sound theatrical, or is it still a grim village realty, and seen most starkly in rural habitat patterns? Especially caste and community based village habitats.
Celebrating Amrit Kaall in the 75th year of our Independence, it is indeed a fair time to assess what changes have taken place, especially in the rural world, where two-thirds of all Indians live.
In a nutshell, while there have been major, sometimes even drastic, changes in the rural world, in totality it has been a mix of economic modernism with back-and-forth spurts in progress!
Today, it is difficult to visualise an India, at the turn of our Independence, that did not produce even food for all its needs. Ship-to-mouth survival systems, sustained by foreign-aided food grains’ imports, sailed us through the Fifties and Sixties, going into the Seventies. Today, both food grains output as well as horticultural output have each exceeded 300 million metric tonne (MMT), with so much to export that any unscheduled capping of exports alarms the world market. India has been the world’s biggest exporter of rice for a decade or so now with more than 40% share in global trade of grain. Besides India’s agricultural products exports have crossed $ 50 billion for the last two fiscal years. Yet, the contribution of rural economy populated by two thirds of the national populace) to the national GDP continues to be well below 20%.
Clearly, capital accumulation is disproportionately weighted in favour of the urban Indian world. As Prof SS Jodhka quotes Slater, to say that (INDIA’sVILLAGES IN THE 21st CENTURY), low wages, low efficiency,and high rates of abstinence from productive activity highlights our rural scene.
Land Reforms in the Fifties largely got rid of feudalistic land holdings, transferring ownership and possession to the cultivating, intermediary castes, which in political terms culminated in the OBC movements from the Eighties leading to political power shifting from the so-called upper castes. But, at the same time, land holdings of the poor peasantry have got so very divided that today two thirds of the entire rural populace of almost a hundred of crore people are either totally landless or have holdings less than an acre. This huge part of the farming community has to buy or depend on PDS doles. In effect, they are the low wages with a low part of productivity profits that occupies the world of poverty in India.
Verily did Slater concluded thus that only a minority of rural households depend on agriculture.
And yet, in this world of surplus food grains, mounting horticultural outputs, and yet a world of poor living on low wages and low productivity, transport and road networks have grown so awesomely that “isolation” between the village and the town has been fairly obliterated. Further, adult mortality has improved from forty years to seventy years. Education has spread to the extent of pushing adult literacy levels from 25% to 75%. Secondary education has multiplied so much that the economy is unable to throw up jobs for all of them, giving rise to the term “excessive education” !
One stark comparison of the Indian village of the Fifties to now, 70 years later is the proliferation of metalled roads, combustion engines, and plastics everywhere in the rural countryside!
As for living patterns, for the young, aspirational villager, “farming has simply gone out of fashion”, even though she cannot get out of the village economy either easily or profitably. Caste still remains, though now increasingly as an electoral weapon. And religion too now plays an increasing role in up-front, mostly unnecessarily, identity politics In all spheres not merely political. While communal violence is still rare in the countryside, but, post-Partition, it did make a debut in Bihar’s Bhagalpur District in 1988, and then resurfaced in Uttar Pradesh’s Muzaffarnagar District in 2012-13.
Significantly, almost like a floating stream, rural life now has a good share of service professions, a middle class, and even strangers.
What we have outlined above is the way rural life in India has been changing substantially since Independence.
Each proposition voiced above needs to be tested and scrutinised against the backdrop of cold statistics and lively development surveys. We at VillageNama plan to do it. The present Outline is meant as a teaser to provoke and instigate serious studies.
Alok Sinha,
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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
