From pride of privilege to perpetual crisis

Surinder S. Jodhka

THE death of Gajendra Singh, a farmer from Rajasthan, in a rally organised by the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi recently has reminded us once again of the desperate situation that many rural farmers face in India today. Even though we do not know for sure if he committed suicide or he died accidently, the symbolic effect of the tragic death of a rather young man is too important and critical to be forgotten as yet another case of adventure gone wrong. 

Dominant narrative

The popular and dominant narrative around farmers' suicides and agrarian crisis has a rather simple way of understanding Gajendra's death. Like many others, Gajendra too would have lost his crop due to the unseasonal rains. Like most other farmers, he too would have borrowed from the local moneylender/ grain merchants or from a commercial bank. Like others, he too would have a family to support. Seeing the damage to his crop and realising his inability to pay back his debt or to be able to take care of his family, his economic desperation may have driven him to a situation where he was left with no source  of hope and decided to end his life.

There is indeed an element of truth in this narrative. However, this narrative also simplifies a reality, which is far more complex. This dominant narrative presents today's rural and agrarian India as a homogenous and flat reality where every resident of the village is a desperate farmer like Gajendra Singh. The crisis of agriculture, however, also has a wider context and a range of internal diversities.

Perhaps the most obvious reality of the contemporary Indian growth story is that though India has been developing at a rather rapid pace over the past two decades and more, India's agrarian economy has been declining. There are some obvious indicators of this. The share of agriculture in the total national income has come down to around 13 percent. If it continues to decline at the rate at which it has declined over the past two decades, which it is likely to, it would soon be making for less than 10 per centof the national income

Limited land

Normally this should be seen as a positive change. As countries develop, the share of agriculture in the national income declines and that of the manufacturing and servicing sectors goes up. Given the limits imposed by its very nature, simply in terms of the limited availability of land, a developing economy must expand its manufacturing sector where the potential of expansion through the use of ever -evolving technology to increase production and incomes is endless.

However, the realities of the Indian situation have been different. Even when the share of agriculture in the national income comes down to merely one quarter of what it was half a century back, nearly half of all working Indians continue to report agriculture as their primary source of livelihood. More than two-third of all Indians continue to be demographically rural. 

While the urban Indian economy has been growing quite rapidly, it has not generated as many new jobs as required for a balanced process of economic transformation. Most of the new growth in India has been in the high-end servicing sector, where only the highly skilled labour is employed. As a result, even when the share of agriculture declines, there is very little migration out of the rural and agriculture to the urban economy. Those who migrate out of the rural tend to go to low-end, low-paying, and mostly insecure contractual jobs in its vast informal economy. 

The process of economic growth and modernisation should have expanded the formal economy but here too India's growth story has been different. Even the organised sector prefers contractual and informal employment to avoid any commitments to its workers. This has been particularly evident during the recent phase ofchange in theIndian economy, during the post-liberalisation period. In the earlier decades, when the educated children of rural farmers and occasionally of landless labourers moved out of village, they moved to secure jobs, mostly in a government department. With fewer jobs available in the state sector, migrations today tend to be almost entirely for jobs in the private sector.  Even the state sector prefers hiring lower-end workers informally by outsourcing services to contractors and private agencies.

The problems of agriculture or cultivating households are not simply a problem of the farming sector but closely tied to the larger process of change, economic, social and aspirational. The decline of agriculture has not simply been of its relative economic value in terms of its contribution to the national income, or of farmers earning less than their counter-parts in urban employment. It is much more than that. 

Owning and cultivating land is not simply a matter of economics and employment. Land has been a source of identity. Agrarian regions and communities that have done well are also the ones who took pride in identification with land. Land, has traditionally also been a source of power and privilege in rural India. Those who owned and cultivated land not only had economic security but also mattered much more in the socio-political life of the village. Caste hierarchies have almost everywhere been closely tied to ownership and non-ownership of land.

Source of economic security

In some sense land continues to be an important source of social and economic security. Those who own land, even if it is just a hectare or less, are far better off than those who do not own anything at all. Unlike the western peasantry, rural inhabitants in India have also been divided. In most regions of the country, more than half of the rural households/workers have always been landless. They almost always come from Dalit communities or the lower sections of those now classified as OBCs. Not owning land has always been a source of vulnerability for them. In some strange ways this continues to be the case even today. For example, it is far easier to mobilise a bank loan for a person to start a petty business if s/he owns even a small plot of agricultural land than the one who owns none. Besides ownership and non-ownership of land, caste networks that go along with land also continue to matter in the changing social life of rural and urban India. 

However, despite the obvious advantage that land-owning communities and households continue to enjoy over those who never owned land, the decline of agriculture is real. Gajendra Singh was not a pauper on the verse of starving. As is evident from his photographs that appeared in the media, he was a rather flamboyant man who tied his turban (and of others) with a sense of pride. There are many farmers in Rajasthan and elsewhere in India whose economic condition is far worse than his and who struggle much more than perhaps he ever did to earn their living. But they do not kill themselves. The loss for Gajendra Singh and thousand others is not simply a matter of economic hardship. It also a loss of dignity and fast-eroding power and privilege. Even when the dominant narrative on agrarian crisis recognises all this, it tends to completely ignore the larger process of change, including the politics of status, privilege and traditional hierarchies.

The writer is Professor of Sociology, Centre for the Study  of Social Systems, Jawaharlal University, New Delhi