Panel Organizers:

Sucha Singh Gill - Department of Economics, Punjabi University, Patiala
Staffan Lindberg - Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden
Shinder Thandi - Department of Economics, University of Coventry, UK
K.S. Babu - Centre for Economic and Social Studies, Hyderabad

Abstract

The Green Revolution ushered a dynamic development of South Asian agriculture in terms of increased yields and income accruing to the rural population. The food problem was solved to an extent that there was enough food to distribute among those who could afford to buy it. It meant an increasingly mechanized agriculture with the use of tractors, thrashers, etc. It also meant gradual industrialization and development of services in rural areas and an increased straddling of particularly the male workforce between agricultural and non-agricultural work. Short and long term migration of labour followed in its wake and there was increasing interaction between rural and urban areas also in terms of media, culture and consumption styles.

But the Green Revolution was also the beginning of widespread stress on nature in rural areas. The increased use of harmful pesticides led to the poisoning of soil. Lavish irrigation of land has put excessive burden on water resources leading to the deforestation and draughts. The Green Revolution was a ‘state-driven, market-mediated and farmer-managed process'. The state orchestrated a vast array of measures to stimulate the process, from institutional changes in land tenure to the regulation of prices of inputs and outputs. The provision of necessary infrastructure in terms of irrigation, roads, power, etc. was also integral to this process.

With the beginning of the 1990s, agriculture policies have turned neo-liberal and the state has started withdrawing from an actual involvement in agriculture production and distribution and other necessary pre-conditions. Most flagrant is the decreasing public investment in infrastructure and development of new technology and an insensitive withdrawal of protection of internal markets from the dumping of western grains in accordance with the WTO rules which few other countries seem to obey. The neo-liberal policies linked to agro market conditions led to increase in risks and vulnerability of the poor farmers many of them fell victims to suicide deaths in many Indian states, especially Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Punjab, etc. The heavy investment on agro-chemicals, machinery and deep bores could not be recovered due to lack of expected level of yields and prices. The vulnerability of yield, prices and spurious quality of chemical inputs have added to viability crisis of poor cultivators.

We invite papers on all these aspects of processes of agricultural and rural transformation in South Asia especially on ecology and farmers' life in the era of neo-liberal globalization.
Sucha Singh Gill, Punjabi University, Dept. of Economics, Patiala, India
Agrarian Transformation in the Post Green Revolution India: Recent Changes
 
The arrival of green revolution in the mid,sixties set in motion the process of capitalist transformation of agriculture in India. It began to transform traditional agriculture into a modernised one and from subsistence agriculture to commercial agriculture. The linkages to market developed through acquisition of new inputs and output disposal. The farmers began to purchase the major share of inputs such as seeds, chemical inputs, mechanical implements and labour services from the market. This began to be accompanied by production for sale in the market. Along with the commodity market there emerged labour market for agricultural labour and lease and sale market for land. This made agriculture susceptible to market signals with different consequences for different categories of the farmers. This brought opportunities for some categories of farmers and difficulties for others. The process of market integration of production system in agriculture accelerated a pace of capital!
  accumulation resulting in increased scale of production on the one hand and led to agrarian change in production relations on the other. This has serious implications for the extent and nature of tenancy with differences across different regions in India. This is accompanied by emerging viability crisis of tiny and small farmers. With beginning of the process of withdrawal of state intervention in the post green revolution phase, the viability crisis is becoming more pronounced with the phenomenon of liquidation of crisis ridden holdings, appearances of reverse tenancy and indebtedness of the farmers. With the publication of the 59th round of National Sample Survey results it is possible to capture some of these changes which was difficult to capture earlier. This paper attempts to capture these changes using recent data. The paper attempts to capture these changes in agriculture of India across states and over two decades period characterized as post green revolution phas!
 
Babu Suri Kandregula, Hyderabad, India
Globalisation, Ecology and Peasant Life in Andhra Pradesh
 
Though the globalisation is accelerating the tempo of social economic changes in India, these changes lead to unexpected conflicting economic and ecological imperatives. The forests are depleting at faster rate though the government records do not reflect the reality at ground level.  Almost one quarter of the land area is officially classified as forest, yet only 12 per cent of land actually dense forest cover. Climate studies also confirms that due to the nature exploitative type  of development, India will likely to face significant adverse impacts to agriculture, health and forestry. The quality of forests has dramatically changed now. Many plant and animal species are disappearing. These forests are in no way sustaining food requirements of tribes through their traditional means of hunting and gathering. Mostly they are dependent on agriculture either as cultivators or agriculture labourers. They are malnourished, poor and largely illiterate. In plain areas, liberalisation linked agro market conditions lead to number of suicide deaths by farmers. For example, cotton cultivation has been taken up in areas, which were not traditionally cotton,growing areas. However, the cotton failed due to severe pest attack. The frequent sprays and spurious quality of pesticides used made them even more ineffective. The heavy investment made in purchase of agri,chemicals could not be recovered because the yield was much below the expected level. During recent years Andhra Pradesh is worst affected by farmers suicide deaths. According to NSS report on village facilities, cable TV is percoloated to more than 50 percent of the villages in all South Indian states. This will have greater impact on socio,cultural aspects and food consumption pattern. In the paper, an attempt will be made examine these issues based on 58th and 59th rounds of NSS reports on village facilities and household consumer expenditure and other recently conducted micro studies.
 
Jeevan Raj Sharma, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Imagining Rural Nepal as Agrarian and Traditional: an ethnography of development discourse in Nepal
 
In this paper I take issue with powerful academic and policy discourses that have developed a set of representations to imagine Nepal as a stable, immobile, agrarian and traditional society.  A set of academic and policy discourses have remained silent on the issue of mobile nature of rural population in the hills, and where discussed it has been represented as a problem to hill society, culture and economy.  The hill population is represented as passive victims of ecological and economic crisis who are often treated as no more than a faceless mass of people who react to the forces over which they have no control.  Mobility is viewed as a dependent variable in the larger equation involving economic imbalances between different regions and class. Such representations have influenced policy responses that have tended to pay relatively little attention to mobility as an important aspect of Nepali economy and society but seeing it as an unfortunate and essentially byproduct of a stagnant rural economy to be eliminated by development programs, particularly within the agriculture sector.  This hegemony of agriculture in development policies are reflected in policy documents including 20 year Agricultural Perspective Plan (APP), World Bank's Poverty Assessment (1996) and the policy documents of other donors like USAID, CIDA and ADB. This discursive imagination suggests that agriculture is not only central in people's livelihoods but must be a central element in any development strategy in rural Nepal.  I argue that these compelling narratives have helped to produce new forms of imagination and socio,political engagements in Nepal and facilitated international development aid for agricultural development, environmental protection, population control and various humanitarian efforts without taking people's perspective into account.
 
Shinder Thandi, Coventry University, Coventry Business School, Coventry, UK
Post Green Revolution Agrarian Performance, Transformation and Rural Wellbeing in the two Punjabs: understanding the trends and future prospects
 
The Indian and Pakistan Punjabs, divided by an arbitrary international border amidst the painful and bloody partition which lead to over one million deaths and the displacement of over 8 million people in 1947, continues to provide an interesting case study of comparative agrarian performance and development.  Both Punjabs have achieved remarkable economic success in the last 50 years and continue to play important roles in the economies of India and Pakistan. Both have attempted to diversify away from over,reliance on the agricultural sector with varying degrees of success. Despite these attempts, the agrarian sector still remains the most important determinants of the population's well,being and as is well known East or Indian Punjab has tended to outperform Pakistan Punjab both in terms of agrarian performance and in terms of human development. This exploratory paper has three major objectives: firstly it revisits the agrarian performance of the two Punjabs since the 1970s and analyses the major factors behind their differential performance and experience.  Secondly it discuses the distributional aspects of their respective performance by linking and measuring the impacts of this performance on human development and general well,being and finally it identifies emerging constraints, both agrarian and environmental, to critically examine the issue of sustainable livelihoods in the two Punjabs and whether greater co,operation between them (e.g. under SAFTA) may generate mutual benefits.
 
Ranjit Singh Ghuman, Punjabi University, Patiala, India
Post,Green Revolution Transformation of Rural South Asia: Agriculture, Employment and Environment
 
The paper deals with five South Asian Countries as the data and information about the other three countries is very scanty. 
 
India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal are in the category of low income economies and Sri Lanka falls in the category of lower,middle,income economies. These five countries account for 97.87 per cent population, 99 per cent GNI and 86.38 per cent surface area of South Asia.  They account for 22.31 per cent population of the World.  Nearly, 39 per cent of the World's extreme poor  are living in South Asia. 
These countries continue to be predominantly rural and agrarian in terms of the share of population and workforce.  The proportion of rural population and workforce ranges between 60 to 80 per cent, respectively.   The very success of 'green revolution' has, however, put a great pressure on environment, ecology, water resources, and the very sustainability of agriculture. 
 
Agricultural development in these countries did not go along the Kaldor,Kuznets long term dynamics of agrarian transformation and thereby rural transformation.  As such the diversification of rural economy, not only in terms of output, but also in terms of employment, is imperative for the sustainability and development of the rural economies. 
 
The low productivity agricultural activities, the ever,rising rural unemployment, shrinking labour absorption capacity of agriculture are other very serious limitations of the rural and agrarian economies of these countries.  All this has resulted in increased rural,urban gap and a growing sense of deprivation on the part of rural population.
Massive shifting of subsidies from the reductionable 'boxes' to non,reductionable 'boxes' ('green' and 'blue' boxes), under WTO,regime, by the developed countries is another serious challenge to the rural and agricultural economies of South Asia. 
The full length version of the paper would be a modest attempt to analyze and discuss all the issues.
 
Lindberg Staffan, Lund University, Department of Sociology, Lund, Sweden
South India: 25 Years of Change in the Kaveri Delta Agriculture
 
This paper reports from an ongoing panel study of 240 agricultural households in 6 villages in Trichy and Karur districts in Tamilnadu which were interviewed 25 years ago. Three of the villages belong to canal irrigated area along the river Kaveri, which we call wet villages and three of the villages belong to a dry rain,fed area, which we call dry area. In 1979,80 this area was already deep into the green revolution with increasing employment and incomes. In the wet area there had been land reform and in the dry there had been an increase in well irrigation, both being important for the success of the application of the new high yielding crop technology. When we returned in 2005 we find considerable changes. Agricultural operations have been mechanised to a large extent with tractors and power tillers used for ploughing the fields and for transports. Threshing is now done by threshing machines. The most striking change is however, the water crisis in both areas. This used to be an area where the wet villages had assured water supply all year round and the opportunity to raise three crops. Today less water is flowing through the Kaveri since Karnataka State has decided to keep most of the water for its own farmers. Add to this that it had not rained for 3 years. The response to this situation has been to dig wells in the wet area and to try other, less water demanding crops. In the dry area, most of the farming had come to a standstill with the lack of rains and a rather desperate situation. Rich capitalist farmers have now deep bore wells while their poor neighbours have no water in their wells. Another significant change is the increase in non,agricultural economic activities.
 
Naresh Singh, IBS Campus, ICFAI Business School, Haryana, India
Understanding the Process of Agriculture and Land Reforms in India: Perspectives on Theories of Institutional Change and Political Behaviour
 
The present paper is based on the premises that poverty has its own culture. Social system and sub,systems of this culture are built upon exploitation. The rich and the power holders exploit the poor. Process of agriculture and land reforms in India is not its opposite. It has occurred in this culture of poverty and is still continuing. In this article an attempt has been made to understand the process of agriculture land reforms in India with its historical background by applying theories of institutional change and political behaviour. The main explanations in the article are based on i) strategic conflict and distribution, ii) powers and sources actors, iii) role of extracting bandits and iv) difference between formal and effective property rights. These explanations have been derived from the theories of R. H. Coase (problem of social cost), Oliver E. Williamson (new institutional economics) and Konard Hegedorn (political institutions and processes). The paper concludes with some of the alarming findings like under the process of agriculture and reforms in India we see a clear strategic conflict where political leaders were reluctant to implement land reforms because of their vested interest of being big landholders themselves. The power and sources of actors never wanted to share power with the poor people and they legitimised this power into authority by entering into political system. Bureaucrats provided all their support to protect the interest of political leaders cum big agriculture landholders; whether it is the case of enforcing land ceiling Acts in different States or land consolidation. Their role was like bandits in political economy. In the entire process of agriculture and land reforms in India, we also see a clear difference between formal and effective proper rights.
 
Kanwaljit Kaur Gill, Punjabi University, Patiala, India
Transformation of Agriculture and Female Employment: An Analysis of Indian States
 
Under the policy of planned economic development Indian agriculture has experienced a qualitative transformation and change in employment structure.  Though overall female work participation (FWP) has increased from 19.7 per cent during 1981 to 22.3 per cent in 1991 and further to 25.7 per cent in 2001.  Their participation has witnessed decline during the last decade in agriculture.  FWP, if any, has increased in household activities only.  The new agricultural technology has led to casualization and marginalization of female employment in agriculture.  This has pushed them into less skilled and less mechanized operations.  This paper attempts to investigate how far the introduction of modern technology in agriculture has led to the displacement of females from productive and remunerative activities on one hand and increased exploitation of female workers on the other.  The intensity of this exploitation is, however, different in different parts of the Indian states.  With the help of census data and the NSSO data for the states, the paper analyses the existing scenario of FWP in rural India.  Further, it examines the possibilities of increasing their participation in agriculture in the changed scenario.
 
The empirical data gives evidence of increased FWP in agriculture when labour hours required were compared in the cultivation of traditional crops and vegetables.  The traditional crops have been generating employment for male oriented operations, and the vegetables growing favours female employment.  The aggregative analysis shows that share of female employment in all vegetables is about 59 per cent as compared to that of male employment, 38 per cent.  Rest 3 per cent is the child labour.  Crop diversification is, therefore, suggested as a measure to increase FWP.
State should, therefore, intervene for proper marketing of the agricultural produce to encourage diversification.  At the same time vocational training to rural women should also be given to make her able to perform other operations in agriculture more efficiently.
 
Staffan Öhrling, Mid,Sweden University, Östersund, Sweden
From Clay Pot to Colour TV. Contrasts and Similarities in Socio,geographic Development for Sri Lanka and Two Local Communities 1972,2006
 
This paper is a comprehensive review over 34 years of development in Sri Lanka and two local communities there, Bundala and Panapola Pelawatte. The two villages are situated in two contrasting climatic regions, the Dry Zone of the lowland region in the southeast, and the Wet Zone of the southern hill country. The climatic differences have been considered to influence preconditions for development in general and in particular for agriculture. From 1972, changes and development have been investigated continuously by the author for these two villages as well as for the whole country. The aim of this article is to review changes in the two villages and to compare this with development in Sri Lanka in a long time perspective. Development in the two villages, located in what was previously considered as neglected areas, was for this reason assumed to be lagging behind the rest of the country. Somewhat surprisingly, conditions in recent years have improved considerably in Bundala and Panapola Pelawatte also compared with the rest of the country in spite of the relative isolation of these communities. Two major drawbacks last year on the national level was the aftermath of the 24,12 tsunami 2004 and the Norwegian,brokered ceasefire between LTTE and SLA from 2002 turning very volatile late in 2005. How these two factors have affected development for Sri Lanka as well as the two continuously investigated villages will be reviewed later in this paper. This article will therefore provide an epitome of drawbacks as well as positive changes at two aggregation levels, the national and the local, and suggest some explanations for the recent directions of development in the concluding part.
 
Sujoy Dutta, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Rethinking Power Relationships in Rural Uttar Pradesh
 
In Uttar Pradesh (UP), until mid,1960s, power in villages tended to center around a few dominant castes. However, since India's independence in 1947, there have been significant changes in village power structure. Notable among such transformations include:

• Improvement in the relationship between Thakurs and Jats with weaker groups;
• Improvement in living standards of lower castes with the advent of modern technology in UP agriculture;

In order to examine these issues, my paper will identify the dominant groups in UP village(s) and investigate the bases and forms of control exercised by dominant groups. Accordingly the study will consider the bases on which these groups have managed to establish their position; how the sources of power have altered over time; and how the changing tactics employed by these groups have served to sustain their dominance.
The study will also consider the methods employed by the weaker groups to survive the supremacy of dominant groups. Where have their attempts failed, and where have they succeeded? Finally, the paper will consider to what extent strategies employed by weaker groups have been successful in enabling them to escape the supremacy of dominant groups.
 
Muzaffar Assadi, University of Mysore, Karnataka, India
Agrarian Crisis and Farmers' Suicide in India:  Dimension, Nature and the response of  the state in Karnataka (32)
 
Farmers' suicide in different parts of India, particularly Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Maharastra and Karnataka over the past one decade or so has completely changed the discourse on Indian agriculture.  These issues of suicide have come at a time when the debate on the agrarian economy was shifting from the primacy of mode of production of 1960s(Alice Thorner: 1982, Kathleen Gough: 1980) to the growing crisis of the economy in the 1980s to the farmers' suicide in the recent years It also came at a time when Indian agriculture was also undergoing tremendous transformation: Indian agriculture was progressively acquiring the "small farm character"; focus was shifting from food grains to non,food grains; new inputs such as seeds occupying the prominent place  in the inputs; agriculture slowly but steadily linking to the global market.
 
Nonetheless the suicide is the manifestation of larger crisis, crisis of agrarian capitalism as well,, the beginning of such crisis needs to be located much earlier to the decade of globalization, particularly during the decade of 1980s when terms of trade was going against the agriculture (Pradeep Bose: 1981,Ashok Rudra: 1982), urban biased policies were dominating the state policies and farming was becoming a loosing proposition. During this decade the crisis was manifested in the forms of farmers' movement (Tom Brass: 1995, S.S.Gill: 1995, Staffan Lindberg: 1995, Gail Omvedt; 1980,95,97, Assadi: 1995&1997). Nowhere agrarian crisis translated into suicide form. This is because the agitation politics provided the farmers' a sense of identity, a new discourse, a new vision about themselves and the world around them. A shift in the discourse came at a time when India was embracing neo,liberal agenda which in the final analysis went against the Indian farmers: it further sharpened the crisis of agrarian economy; it increased the rural indebtedness (Deshpande&Nagesh: 2006; further marginalized the rural categories. and trapped the rural categories in the larger network of global capital through the mediation of seeds, new technology etc.
 
The number of farmers' committing suicide was much higher during 1995, 2002, it was estimated that in Andhra Pradesh more than 3,000 farmers' committed suicide, in Karnataka more than 700(Assadi: 1998 &2005) farmers' have committed suicide. However, our paper will focus on the Karnataka state in India to under stand the larger crisis of the agriculture. This is because of the fact that the Karnataka state is one of the first states to introduce New Agricultural Policy (Assadi: 1995) in recent years that helped the agriculture to open up to the vagaries of globalization; it is one of the states which saw the New Farmers' Movement opposing the globalization as well as highlighting the suicide; it is also one of the states which witnessed the sharp agrarian crisis during the of post,green revolution era and finally it is one of the first states which also witnessed the sharp decline in farmers' suicide during the past two years.
In our paper an attempt will be made to understand the following:
·           The reasons for the growing agrarian crisis beginning from post,Green Revolution period
·           The changes that the new technology brought in in recent years
·           The larger framework to understand the growing crisis and the suicide
·          Why suicide is not reflected in such states as BIMARU in India than in Punjab, AP and Karnataka
·          The similarity and dissimilarity in the nature of agrarian crisis and suicide in Karnataka and AP/Maharastra and Punjab.
·           The social composition of farmers' committing suicide
·           The response of the state to contain the crisis including the suicide
 
We would conclude that farmers' committing suicide must have declined in Karnataka but the agrarian crisis is not over. It is increasing and enveloping the whole of agrarian society and creating multiple crisis
 
Neil Webster, Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen, Denmark
Contesting Economic Control in a West Bengal Village
 
The paper takes its point of departure in the pro,poor agricultural economic growth that has occurred in West Bengal in the past three decades. The discussion of this has tended to focus on the role of reforms instigated by the Left Front Government (LFG) and the role of technologies in facilitating the cultivation of rice and other crops. The agency of the poor in the agrarian sector has tended not to figure prominently in these discussions. As a counterweight to these approaches, the paper looks at the engagement of the poor in the ' flow of action' (Arensberg via Wolf via Nuijten) in Kashnagram village in Bardhamman District, West Bengal. The state of their life condition is seen to involve two parallel processes, one set rooted in a set of structures that shape opportunities for their actions and the other set rooted in organising practices that are engaged in on an everyday basis. The latter are closely linked to practices of exclusion a!
 nd inclusion with consequences for access to key resources, assets, and services. The patterns and regularities that enable one to identify organising practices are linked to force fields of power relations in the neighbourhood, the village and to authorities and institutions beyond the village space. In this way the analysis demonstrates the ways in which control, and economic control in particular, is exercised from below and not just from above, by the poor and not just the non,poor.