A Note on Rural Development in India

A Note on Rural Development in India

 

 

 

Poverty in Rural India

At the beginning of 2000, it has been estimated that approximately one-third of the world's poor live in India, and there are more poor people in India alone than in the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. According to the estimates of the internationally recognized poverty line of one dollar a day, 44% of persons in India are poor, and 86% of people earn less than $2 a day. Indian poverty is predominantly rural: 75 per cent of the country’s poor live in rural areas where landless households, Scheduled Castes and Tribes, women and female-headed households, old people, and female children face more deprivation than others (Saxena and Farrington 2003).

Poverty is an extremely complex phenomenon that manifests itself in a range of overlapping and interwoven economic, political and social deprivations. These include mainly lack of assets (primarily land), low-income levels, hunger, poor health or malnutrition, insecurity, physical and psychological hardship, social exclusion, degradation and discrimination, and political powerlessness and disarticulation. The data, released by the Government of India (2000), shows that 42 per cent of the rural poor fall into the most economically disadvantaged group of agricultural labour. 32 per cent of them undertake agricultural cultivation using their own labour. They hardly enjoy the few resources (natural resources, schooling, power connections, health facilities, etc.) available in the villages. Their children are severely malnourished and the nutritional status is alarming. Furthermore, more than half of this group consists of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SCs and STs). Overall, SCs and STs constitute about 22% of the rural population but account for more than 42% of the poor. Within the poor rural households, women, cutting across caste lines, are significantly more disadvantaged than men and suffer much more.

Thus, multiple deprivations linked to poverty are a deeply rooted reality in the countryside, and any comprehensive effort to reduce poverty must confront that reality and its consequences. The realities are visible in the segregated hamlets where many of the poor households live on the fringes of rural villages. The village situation also makes them unable to avail community services – schools, health centres, public hand pumps, and shops that distribute subsidised grains – which are in principle meant to assist the poor.

Land Holding and Land Use

Rural poverty has largely been shaped by the unequal and skewed distribution of natural and state generated resources, primarily land and employment opportunities, among people. Sickening inequities vis-à-vis land ownership in rural India have continued since independence in spite of the various land reform measures by government to bring about a more even distribution of holdings. On the basis of NSS data, Chadha (1994), by clubbing the households owning no land with those owning only homestead land but no arable land into one class, finds that functional landlessness has increased in relative terms since 1953-54 in most states, particularly in agriculturally progressive states. In between 1961-62 to 1982, the proportion of such landless households in rural India has increased from 28 per cent to 43 per cent. This finding makes it clear that the programme of land reforms has failed in most of the states, and the transactions of land in the by and large uncontrolled market has added to the share of landless rural households.

This apart, as the data shows, the number of small/marginal owners has increased over the years along with the area they owned and the average size of their holdings. This is primarily because of the population pressure on land and the breaking up of the households owning large farming land. Though the proportion of families owning large tracts of land has declined, they still own a substantial portion of the land in most of the states.

The NSS data also shows that the share of households owning but not operating any land in rural India has remained constant at around 17 per cent over 1961-62 to 1982. However, It can be a misnomer to refer to this group as a ‘rentier class’ as it includes, apart from absentee landowners, households owning very small holdings but leasing them out in order to work as wage labourers in or outside agriculture. There is a considerable proportion of households who neither own nor operate land. Almost all of them constitute the class of agricultural labour households. The absolute number and proportion of this class have increased over time practically everywhere, partly owing to population increase and partly owing to downward mobility. There is a high correspondence between this group of households and the incidence of rural poverty

In such a situation, one would expect the distribution of operational holdings to be less skewed than ownership holdings, on the assumption that larger owners generally rent land to smaller ones. While this is true in theory, ground reality in rural India is more complex, and landlords and tenants cannot be divided into mutually exclusive classes (see Neale 1990, Sahay 2001). In rural India, there is growing trend that many with relatively large operational holdings lease-in land from smaller owners (the phenomenon of so-called ‘reverse tenancy’). In the area where there has been rapid mechanization and commercialisation of agriculture, such as Haryana and Punjab, this trend is more dominant. This trend or the concentration of operational holdings in the hands of land holding class is functionally related with the displacement of tenants and increase in hired labour. This situation has further increased inequality in rural India.

Some significant studies also draw our attention to the fact that households owning/operating even tiny holdings are significantly less likely to experience absolute poverty. A land base, however small, is argued to offer some security, collateral, and opportunities to increase incomes through livestock production or other land-based activities (see Agarwal 1994, Lipton 1985). That is why, the incidence of chronic poverty among landless farm labourers is still much higher than among average landed persons.

The State of Employment and Rural Vulnerability

The state of employment in rural India is also quite distressing for the poor. Out of the total rural workers, 60 per cent (238 million) are employed in agricultural sector and 33 per cent (133 million) in the unorganised non-agricultural sector, whereas only 7 per cent (28 million) are employed in organized sector. This apart, the changing composition of employment is also making the life of rural poor worse. While self-employment is on the decline, casual employment is on the rise. The share of self-employed in the rural workforce declined from 62% in 1977–8 to 56% in 1999–2000, while the proportion of casual labour increased from 30% to 37%. Regular employment declined from 7.8% to 6.7% during the same period (Radhakrishna, 2002). The proportion of rural households receiving incomes from cultivation fell from 62.4% in 1987–8 to 57.1% in 1999–2000. The government data shows that in the 1990s higher GDP growth rates were accompanied by a decline in growth of rural employment. In fact, rural employment has fallen in absolute terms too.

Programmes for Poverty Reduction in Rural India

Alleviating the bane of mass poverty in rural India was one of the major goals set for the nation when we embarked on our planned development effort more than five decades ago (Dreze and Sen 2002). What followed was a series of efforts to formulate and implement a set of different policies and programmes by central as well as state governments to achieve this goal. Over the years, rural poverty alleviation programmes of various types and the annual plan provisions have been expanding in size and today there is a wide variety of such programmes absorbing a large volume of resources. The annual Plan provision in 2002–3 for Centrally Sponsored Schemes in rural development is Rs180bn, for food subsidy Rs240bn, and for fertiliser subsidy about Rs110bn, making a total of Rs530bn. But the fact remains that, even as we have launched the Tenth Five Year Plan starting from 2002 and prepare ourselves to take on the challenges of the new millennium, poverty and deprivation continue to plague rural India.

The programmes, despite their good intentions, did not succeed in eliminating poverty and deprivation from rural India for various reasons (Dandekar and Rath 1971, Rao 1990). Most of these programmes were beset with problems like corruption, leakage of resources to non-poor, lack of integration across sectors to create a better impact and giving too much emphasis on time bound target achievement of households (Rath 1990). Further, the adoption of a top-down approach and lack of people’s participation in the planning and implementation of the developmental programmes were identified as the other factors responsible for the inability and ineffectiveness of the direct attack programmes to bring about significant reduction in the poverty (Oklay et. al 1991).

Recently, efforts have been made to overcome some of the problems of the top-down approach for poverty alleviation and to enable the people to participate more actively in the implementation of the developmental programmes. Strengthening and streamlining of Panchayati Raj institutions by way of the 73rd Constitutional Amendment, and co-opting the institution of civil society such as non-governmental organizations in implementing various developmental programmes were some of the steps taken to improve peoples’ participation and effectiveness of the poverty alleviation programmes. Overall, thus the state has been the major actor for taking initiatives to tackle the problems of poverty and deprivation.

Caste and its Changing Pattern: Main Points

Caste and its Changing Pattern: Main Points

[Citation: Gaurang R. Sahay, Caste and its Changing Pattern: Main Points (2011, Unpublished)]

Caste is one of the most significant social structures of society in India. It denotes a system of social stratification that traditionally consists of hierarchically ranked hereditary endogamous and occupational social groups. Caste is generally believed to be an ancient, abiding, and unique Indian (Hindu) institution sustained by a complex cultural ideology. This cultural ideology, that is traced back to an oral tradition preserved in the Rigveda (dating from perhaps 1000 BCE), is religious in nature and represents an ancient four-fold hierarchical arrangement of categories called the varnas (Brahmins, Kshatriya, Vaishyas and Shudras in this order) which are believed to be invariant, permanent, unchangeable and present throughout in the Indian subcontinent. In the varna framework, the Brahmins, creator of the ideology, assigned every good thing for themselves, directly or indirectly: noble identity, twice-born status, sacerdotal authority, and command over the other varnas, and allocated most menial and degrading occupations to the Shudras. Under this pan Indian ideological framework, the institution of caste consists of many region specific hierarchically ranked caste groups (officially around 4,500).

        Caste has long been a subject of discussion. It was extensively discussed in the classical literature of Hinduism (such as Manusmriti or the Manavdharmashastra) that provided different explanations and justifications for the system. However, a theoretical conceptualization of caste started only with the advent of social science. Now we have different kinds of conceptual understanding of the system that can be broadly grouped together on the basis of logical and factual similarities into two larger theoretical frameworks which can be called as ‘hierarchy thesis’ and ‘difference thesis’. Hierarchy thesis, that is primarily a book-view, brings out the traditional or ritual based hierarchical character of the system; whereas difference thesis, which is based on the facts from the field, brings out the contested character of caste hierarchy, shows up its discrete character of caste and understands caste as a system of differentiation.

       The institution of caste is generally considered to be a unique structural form of social inequality. On the basis of caste affiliation it places certain sections of people into dominating position, and others into subordinate position. The system uses inbuilt institutional mechanisms for this purpose. One of those mechanisms is the jajmani system. People in subordinate position go through a number of exploitative situations which are more often than not camouflaged by caste based ideological indoctrination.

     In the past, there have been many efforts to erase or reduce caste inequalities. Those efforts were mainly in the form of social movements or protests. Such efforts acquired wide ranging legitimacy when India became a democratic secular republic after Independence in 1947, and, accordingly, the government of India introduced some far reaching policies of social justice to bring about equality among castes. Two of them – land reforms and positive discrimination or affirmative action – are the most noteworthy. These efforts along with other measures of modernisation process in India, which, in fact, started with the British Rule, have been transforming caste from a hierarchical structure into a differentiated structure. The main points of the lecture along with important readings are as follows:

Meaning of Caste

First of all, it were Portuguese observers who, in the middle of the 16^th century, used the word casta, means purity of breed, (from Latin castus, ‘chaste’) to describe the differentiated character of Hindu society. Subsequently, this word was translated into English language as caste and has been widely used to make sense of the social organisation of the Hindu Society. Caste is generally believed to be an ancient, abiding, and unique Hindu system of ideas and values that categorises Hindus into hierarchically ranked hereditarily endogamous occupational groups. This system is upheld by a complex cultural ideology. The framework of this cultural ideology is derived from the Varna system that is made up of four varnas: 1. Brahmin, 2. Kshtriya, 3. Vaishya, and 4. Shudra. The four varnas, together with the division of the individual life cycle into four stages or ashrams – Brahmacharya (the years of learning and extreme discipline), Grahasthya (householdership), Vanaprastha (retirement), and Sannyasa (renunciation of all worldly bonds) is considered an archetypical blueprint for ideal Hindu way of life which is called Varnashrama dharma.

Features of the Caste System

1. Hierarchical division of society based on the religious principle of the superiority of the pure over the impure
2. Restrictions on feeding and social intercourse
3. Civil and religious disabilities and privileges
4. Religion based division of labour
5. Lack of unrestricted choice of occupation
6. Restriction on marriage
7. Caste as a closed group characterised by changelessness  
    

The Issues that Determine Position of a Caste in Caste Hierarchy

1. The nature and item of its dietary
2. Acceptance and refusal of water and food from other castes
3. The ritual it performs
4. The custom it observes
5. Its traditional privileges and disabilities
6. The myth of its origin

Sources of Change in the Caste System in Pre-modern India

1. Fluidity of the political system
2. The availability of marginal land due to static demographic situation
3. Sanskritisation

The Concept of Sanskritisation

The concept of Sanskritisation refers to ‘a process by which a ‘low’ Hindu caste or tribal or other group changes its customs, ritual, ideology, and way of life in the direction of a high, frequently, ‘twice born’ caste. Generally such changes are followed by a claim to a higher position in the caste hierarchy than that traditionally conceded to a claimant caste by the local community (Srinivas 1966: 6). Srinivas further adds: ‘While the sources of mobility lay in the political and economic systems, Sanskritization provided a traditional idiom for the expression of such mobility’ (Srinivas 1991: 315).

The Concept of Dominant Caste

According to M. N. Srinivas, ‘A caste may be said to be ‘dominant’ when it preponderates numerically over the other castes, and when it also wields preponderant economic and political power. A large and powerful caste group can be more easily dominant if its position in the local caste hierarchy is not too low’ (Srinivas 2002: 75). Srinivas further adds two more criteria to the concept: ‘the number of educated persons in a caste and the occupations they pursue’ (ibid.: 75).

Sources of Change in the Caste System in during the British Rule

1. The introduction of a single political rule straddling the entire subcontinent
2. The introduction of formal bureaucratic and military organisations
3. The land survey
4. The introduction of tenurial reforms
5. The introduction of private ownership to land which made land saleable
6. Making new opportunities in towns and cities available
7. The introduction of the concept of equality of all before the law
8. Providing right to everyone not to be imprisoned without resorting to due legal process
9. Introducing the freedom to choose, practice and propagate one’s religion and culture
10. Making suttee, human sacrifice and human slavery illegal

Sources of Change in the Caste System after Independence in 1947

The Independent India strengthened further the process of modernisation initiated by the British rule by adopting democratic system of governance and model of capitalist economy for development, and implementing various majors of social change such as abolition of untouchability, Land Reforms, Green Revolution, Affirmative Action policies such as reservation of jobs for lower castes (the Scheduled Castes and Backward Castes) in government or public sector institutions, seats in educational institutions and political bodies such as Parliament, Assemblies and Panchayats, etc.

The Category of ‘Scheduled Caste’

The category ‘Scheduled Caste’ was first brought into use during the British rule by The Government of India Act, 1935. The Government of India (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1936, further clarified the category and specified a number of castes as ‘Scheduled Castes’. Independent India, through The Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950, accepted the existing category of ‘Scheduled Castes’, and published a revised ‘Scheduled Castes’ list. The Order defined the category as consisting of those castes that were associated with the most impure work and menial labour with no possibility of upward mobility, and were subjected to severe social exclusion and disadvantages, in comparison to the other castes. In other words, the castes that constitute the category of ‘Scheduled Caste’ were ‘untouchable castes’ in the past.

The Category of ‘Backward Caste’

The term ‘Backward Caste’ signifies those castes that have been categorised as ‘Other Backward Classes’ by Constitutional provision. It consists of those castes which, like the ‘Scheduled Castes’, were in the past subjected to exclusions and, therefore, remained socially and educationally backward, despite having a higher position than the ‘Scheduled Castes' in the local, traditional caste hierarchy. Based on the recommendations of the Mandal Commission, the government of India made the category operational throughout the country from 1990.

Significant Changes in the Caste System

1. Weakening of the principle of purity and pollution
2. Dissociation between caste and occupation
3. Disintegration in the jajmani system
4. Breakdown in the inter-caste power relationship
5. Emergence of caste association
6. Incresed activity of caste in political field or politicisation of caste

Emerging Features of the Caste System in Contemporary India

1. Multiple discrete caste ideologies exemplified by particularly caste origin tales
2. Multiple and muddled hierarchies
3. Discrete ideologies therefore discrete character of castes
4. From hierarchy to different identity
5. Endogamy based on the idea of putative biological differences
6. Differences are semaphored by ritualisation of multiple social practices
7. Hypersymbolism

Defining Caste in Contemporary India

To quote Dipankar Gupta: ‘We will define the caste system as a form of differentiation wherein the constituent units of the system justify endogamy on the basis of putative biological differences which are semaphored by the ritualisation of multiple social practices’ (1991: 137) .

Readings List:

1. Srinivas, M. N. 2002. Varna and Caste. In Collected Essays by M. N. Srinivas, 166-172. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

2. Srinivas, M. N. 2002. Some Reflections on the Nature of Caste Hierarchy. In Collected Essays by M. N. Srinivas, 66-172. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
3. Dumont, Louis. 1988 [1970]. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications. Translated by Mark Sainsury, Louis Dumont and Basia Gulati. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
   
   
4. A Review Symposium on Homo Hierarchicus. 1971. Contributions to Indian Sociology (n. s.) 5: 1-13.
   
   
5. Gupta, Dipankar. (ed.). 1991. Social Stratification. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
6. Gupta, Dipankar. 2000. Interrogating Caste: Understanding Hierarchy and Difference in Indian Society. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
7. Sahay, Gaurang. 2004. Hierarchy, Difference and the Caste System: A Study of Rural Bihar. In Caste in Question: Identity or Hierarchy? (ed.) Dipankar Gupta, 113-136. New Delhi: Sage Publications.

8. Gough, Kathleen. 1960. The Hindu Jajmani System. Economic Development and Cultural Change 9 (1), 83-91.
9. Srinivas, M. N. 2002. The Dominant Caste in Rampura. In Collected Essays by M. N. Srinivas, 74-92. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
10. Srinivas, M. N. (ed.). 1996. Caste: Its Twentieth Century Avatar. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
11. Béteille, Andre. 1996. Caste, Class and Power: Chaging Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village. Berkley: University of California Press.
12. Béteille, Andre. 1992. The Backward Classes in Contemporary India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
13. Jaffrelot, Christopher. 2003. India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India. New York: Columbia University Press.
14. Galanter, Marc. 1984. Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
15. Baxi, Upendra. 1985. Caste, class and reservation. Economic and Political Weekly 20(10).