Econ Dev Village India Ils 59

M. R. Haswell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134553860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is Volume XVII of eighteen in the Sociology of Development series. First published in 1967, this book focuses on the economics and of an Indian village, allowing Indian agriculture to be seen in a new dimension. This book will enable the reader to obtain a clearer and more extensive view of agriculture in Southern India.

Chapter One

THE AGRARIAN SITUATION

India may be aspiring to industrial self-sufficiency. Daniel Thorner was reported in The Statesman, after a return visit, as saying that ‘one of the most encouraging signs of economic growth in India today is not the much touted population explosion but the industrial explosion which is giving rise to a multitude of family workshops, or private entrepreneurs, working in the evening hours and getting electricity by tapping the mains without benefit of meters’.

Even if world trading arrangements could be so designed as to promote the industrial exports of the less-developed countries, the ability of a country to industrialize is dependent in the first place on the production of a surplus from agriculture to feed an increasing proportion of non-agricultural workers and to purchase imports which are urgently needed. There is no evidence that a country can accelerate its rate of economic growth from non-agricultural activity when it is overshadowed by a large agricultural sector which is preoccupied with self-subsistence production.

India’s land surface area is 326 million hectares of which only 59 per cent is cultivable. Total population is approaching 500 millions and is second only to that of China. But what is important is not the overall density of population but its distribution between town and village, and between agricultural and non-agricultural workers.

India is short of towns. Less than 1 per cent of all towns and villages are classified as towns and only 4 per cent of these have a population of more than 100 thousand10 per cent being towns with less than 5,000 persons. 18 per cent of the total population is concentrated in the towns at high densities per square kilometre in relation to the very low standards of housing, and extreme overcrowding in dwelling space.

India then is still largely a country of villages in which some 130 million cultivators and agricultural labourers continue to suffer from bad roads, poor transport, and lack of good market opportunities; only 1 per cent of all her villages have electricity. Daniel and Alice Thorner summarize the condition of the cultivators in their study of land and labour in India: ‘because of the competition for land, the land-owners and money-lenders have been able to make the peasants agree to more and more onerous terms for the use of the soil and of credit’. They believe that ‘enforcement by British officials of law and order has served to protect the land-holding groups from the more violent expressions of popular resentment’, and go on to say that ‘it is in this setting that the cultivators, while retaining in their own hands the conduct of agricultural production, have been stripped of the resources with which to increase their output’.

Changes in the land-labour ratio Dharma Kumar regards as of more importance than changes in social status. On the actual changes in the volume of employment and the level of wages, she can find little information in the first half of the nineteenth century. Wages fluctuated around subsistence level, falling below it in times of famine. She states however that ‘it seems quite clear that real wages were generally falling from 1873 onwards’, and concludes that ‘in the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century the extension of cultivation failed to keep pace with the increase in population and the growth in the agricultural labour force’.

If we accept Boserup’s thesis that peasant communities with a sustained population growth have a better chance of getting into a process of genuine economic growth than peasant communities with stagnant or declining populations, then the question remains as to why agrarian change has not been precipitated by population pressure in one of the most densely populated countries in the world.

The unwillingness of landlords to invest in agriculture rather than the willingness of peasants to use the facilities which investment provides, appears to be a primary cause of failure of the rate of growth of agricultural product to keep pace with or exceed the rate of population growth. Daniel and Alice Thorner found that ‘the rarest figure in the modern Indian countryside has been a genuine capitalist producer – that is, a producer who invests capital in agriculture and strives to secure a maximum profit primarily from the efficiency with which he handles his labour force and his land in productive processes’.

Close inquiry in a comparatively few rural centres into changing economic conditions was considered by Harold Mann, working in the Bombay Deccan in 1916, to be the only effective means of securing data which would lend itself to economic analysis capable of interpretation for the rural sector as a whole.

On taking up his appointment as Professor of Indian Economics in the University of Madras in December 1915, Gilbert Slater determined to direct the attention of students towards the study of particular villages.

In February 1916, he had his first opportunity of seeing something of Indian village life, when he accompanied one of the senior students, E. V. Sundaram Reddi, on a visit to his native village of Eruvellipet.

On the basis of his observations in Eruvellipet, he drew up a Village questionnaire’, had notebooks made up with the questions typed, interleaved with blank pages, and dealt them out to students who undertook to make surveys of their native villages during the long vacation.

He had found on reaching Madras that students looked upon economics as a ‘fairly easy option for degree getting, and as consisting of a series of unintelligible theories to be learnt parrot fashion from Marshall’s Principles, with no relation to actual life in India if anywhere else’. He wanted to make his students regard economics as ‘concerned with ordinary contemporary Indian life, with as its central object of study the causes of, and remedies for Indian poverty’. To incite them to survey their native villages seemed to him a simple way of achieving this result.

In 1918, Slater published his book Some South Indian Villages, in which he included a detailed analysis of economic conditions in twelve villages. Twenty years later, eight of these were resurveyed under the direction of P. J. Thomas, a former Indian student of Slater’s who held the Chair in Economics in the University of Madras at the time of the resurvey.

Slater summed up the situation as one in which ‘various strands of economic, social, and religious conditions and customs, are strangely and deftly interwoven in the web of Indian life, and low wages, low efficiency, and high abstinence, are the ground plan of the pattern’.

Thomas found that after two decades deterioration or stagnation in some vital points overshadows the definite improvements that have been made in some aspects of rural life’. There was no indication that the food supply had kept pace with population growth. Holdings had become more fragmented. Few wells had been sunk. Improved methods of cultivation had been little practised. Draught cattle continued to operate at a low level of efficiency, and milch cattle to give poor yields; methods of breeding and rearing, and fodder supply, remained much the same as in the time of Slater. Absentee landlordism had increased, and resident landlords were less inclined to cultivate their holdings themselves. There was a rapid growth in the number of tenants-at-will and casual labourers. Debts multiplied in the boom period in the twenties, and became frozen in the depression. Go-operative credit had been tried and had failed miserably. Water supply and conservancy arrangements continued to be ‘backward’.

Against this count of wants and failures, Thomas found villages better linked with railways and trunk roads, and even feeder roads had improved. The motor bus had broken the isolation between town and country. There was a positive spread of education. Though credit facilities appeared to have contracted, rates of interest had fallen and continued to remain at lower levels; professional money-lending was giving way to genuine investment. The beginnings of local self-government showed encouraging results. Though still meagre, more medical aid was available in the villages. Lastly, though Thomas did not see this as a process of growth, villages had become less self-sufficient in respect of some foods, even of vegetables. A preference for rice, milled and polished, at the expense of millets, was noted. Coffee and tea had become popular. Mill cloth was competing with the coarse hand-woven goods of the village. Other village industries too had had to capitulate; the hereditary workers were turning to the overcrowded land or joining the ranks of factory hands in towns. The development of hydro-electric power, and the expansion of cotton and garden cultivation, and of the textile industry which brought prosperity to the villages in adjacent areas, had not, however, materially affected the survey villages.

Epstein, who carried out the field work in 1954–6 on which her study of economic development and social change in South India is based, repudiates the notion of the ‘timeless and changeless Indian village’. Her review of events which occurred in two villages in the plains of Mysore during the past twenty-five years confirms that both villages have changed from subsistence to cash economies, though the one has remained wholly agricultural while the other has diversified.

If, in the former case, irrigation had brought about the reallocation of economic resources, this would have caused friction in the traditional economic organization and led to change. But far from upsetting it, irrigation in fact emphasized the existing economic differentiation and economic relations could continue unaltered. The extension of economic ties by the men of the latter outside their own village increased the range of their economic relations causing a decrease in the interdependence between farmers and their agricultural labourers, and the consequent disappearance of the hereditary economic relations between peasant-masters and untouchables; the employment of men outside their own village was in fact incompatible with the indigenous employment structure.

The point of theoretical interest raised by Epstein is that economic development may occur without any change in economic roles and relations provided that it does not result in a reallocation of resources or in an increased range of economic relations.

When it comes to legislation about land, more has been enacted in India since Independence than in any other country in the world, but it has not succeeded in changing in any essentials the power pattern and deep economic disparities associated with traditional hierarchical institutions. Many different types of tenure systems have prevailed in different regions, a number of which may be found within any one State. Anstey broadly classifies the pre-independence situation under two main heads in her study of land reform in India.

Zamindari Settlements, made between the Government and the Zamindars or landholders. ‘These determined the rate of land revenue payable to the Government, but left the Zamindars to make their own terms with their tenants. Permanent settlements were made in some districts of Bengal, North Madras, and Bihar (from 1793 onwards) which replaced land revenue rates by cash payments, fixed once and for all, with disastrous results.’ Phillips traces the thinking and legislation which gave rise to this unprecedented situation in which peasants were mercilessly exploited by landlords. He quotes Revenue Despatches to India in 1862 which exalted the advantages of a permanent settlement, urging that not only would a general feeling of contentment be diffused among the landlords, but that they would also become attached by the strongest ties of personal interest to the Government by which that permanency was guaranteed. But as Anstey points out, ‘this system made no allowance for changes in the value of either land or money, so that, with increasing population pressure and competition for land, the Zamindars were able to raise rents to extortionate levels whilst they had only to pay to the Government an ever decreasing share of their rents as land revenue. Many became extremely wealthy absentee land owners, and ceased to take any interest in cultivation. Temporary settlements (usually from 10–30 years) were made elsewhere. This enabled land revenue rates to be raised on resettlement at the end of each period, but rents could be raised to oppressive levels here also’.

Ryotwari Setdements, originally made between the Government and the actual cultivators or Ryots. These settlements covered rather more than 50 per cent of the country, and were subject to periodic resettlement. ‘But in time,’ Anstey states, ‘with increasing pressure of population and the rise in the value of land, many holdings were leased and later sublet (as a whole, or in part) so that a class of (sometimes non-cultivating) rentreceivers arose here also.’

Fairly large estates were held under zamindar tenures; these included Inam Settlements which provided concession rates or complete exemption from land revenue payments to the Government in return for meritorious service which also left zamindars free to make their own terms when subletting. Under ryotwari tenures, however, land was widely distributed,

In a country in which agriculture was almost the only source of employment, competition became so keen that the subdivison of land among tenants-at-will was extreme, and men with no written contract could be turned off the land at any time by their immediate landlords or occupancy tenants. Anstey summarizes the effect of subdivision of holdings amongst heirs and tenants and fragmentation into scattered plots which resulted in a multitude of uneconomic holdings, each too small to support a family; ‘rack rents prevailed, often leading to indebtedness and loss of land . . . tenures were unsecured, offering no incentive for improvement, whilst the number of landless families rose. The final result was lack of investment and improvement in the land, increasing unemployment and under-employment – and dire poverty. Absentee landlords (and rent receivers in general) invested, or more often spent, their rents in the cities and industrial areas. Periodic famines, epidemics and the depression of the 1930s made matters still worse.

‘By this time a whole series of rights over or interest in the same land – by owners, tenants, subtenants, tenants-at-will, and crop sharers amounting sometimes to 10 or more claims over part of the produce of the same holdings, had been established . . . Under British rule the policy of non-interference with social institutions and customs prevented any drastic land reform, but tenancy reforms were gradually introduced along lines similar to those pursued after independence. In addition, land revenue rates were progressively reduced until their burden became negligible in comparison with that of rents, despite the fixation of maximum rents in some regions.’

From 1947 onwards, legislation was introduced in one State after another. In Madras State, three Acts were passed within a period of one and a half years: the Madras Estates (Reduction of Rent) Bill in October 1947, the Madras Estates Communal Forest and Private Lands (Prohibition of Alienation) Bill, also in October 1947, and on the 2nd April, 1949, the Madras Estates (Abolition of Zamindari and conversion into Ryotwari) Act. The first was framed primarily to give immediate relief to the tenants in zamindari areas, though provision was also made for reducing the rent of occupancy holdings to the level of ryotwari assessment prevalent in the neighbourhood. The passing of this Act, together with the Madras Estates Communal Forest and Private Lands (Prohibition of Alienation) Bill, paved the way for the most important piece of land reform legislation which provided for the transfer to the State of all zamindari rights over tenant lands (whether temporary or permanent settlements). Tenants previously holding land from zemindars were converted into peasant-proprietors with ownership of the land vested in the State, and landlords were compensated on the basis of the annual net income of the estate at a predetermined multiple of that sum.

Anstey, appraising the effects of post-independence land reforms, states that in the short run their main objectives have not been attained. Little or no change has occurred for the bulk of ordinary tenants and landless labourers, largely through lack of proper interpretation and effective administration.

Despite the abolition of zomindari and the introduction of other tenancy reforms, the Government of India still felt it necessary to adopt measures to prevent the concentration of large holdings in the hands of a minority of cultivators, and accepted the principle that a ceiling should be imposed on individual holdings.

The Madras Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling on Land) Bill, 1960, provided for a ceiling of 12 ‘standard’ hectares for every person or family of not more than five members; the Bill also provided for an additional 2 ‘standard’ hectares for each member of the family in excess of five. Under the provisions of the Bill, all persons holding land in excess of this ceiling are required to submit a return so that the ‘surplus’ land might be taken over by the State ‘for a public purpose’.

Ceilings on landholdings have varied widely from State to State with State governments tending to defer legislation. Where these have been imposed at all, they have ranged from 10 to 125 hectares for existing holdings and from 5 to 75 hectares for future acquisitions. Evasion and deferment of ceiling on landholdings has partly arisen because land reform legislation provided for zamindars to retain land for ‘selfcultivation’, the definition of which is complicated and different in different States.

Necessary as land reform measures were at the time of Independence, they were none the less based on a highly generalized image of the agrarian situation, and have not been sufficient to stimulate rural regeneration.

Part One

FIVE SOUTH INDIAN VILLAGES REVISITED

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