Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture Debate

 

Mode of Production in Indian Agriculture Debate

Gaurang R Sahay

Agricultural economy in India had stagnated throughout the latter part of the colonial period and the rate of productivity was much lower compared to other places in Asia (Harriss 2013). The basic structure of agrarian economy remained almost the same during a couple of decades after Independence. Daniel Thorner characterised this situation as 'built-in depressor’, which referred to the concentration of agricultural land in the hands of very few households who gave out maximum amounts of their land for cultivation by share-croppers. The share-croppers depended on the same landlords for loans at high rates of interest for the purpose of cultivating that land. The landlords accounted, too, for almost the total share of all the sales of agriculture produce from the village. In other words, the term ‘the depressor’ refers to an agrarian relation dominated by landlords who lived by appropriating rents, usurious interest and speculative trading profits from the impoverished mass of the peasantry. Thus, the landlords had no incentive to invest in agriculture and the impoverished peasant masses were left with no means of investment. Consequently, agriculture remained stagnant. The then ruling Congress Party had recognized this condition in a Report of the ‘Congress Agrarian Reforms Committee of 1949’. Accordingly, land reform laws were enacted to change the situation.

During the early 1950s, various states brought about major changes in the pattern of land ownership through the abolition of the zamindary system or intermediary rights and tenures controlled by the tax-farming zamindars and conferring rights over land to the royats or tenants. But a review of land reform laws clearly indicates that these reforms did not bring about the end of ‘landlordism’. In practice, it was the larger occupancy tenants who benefited most from zamindari abolition by becoming real owners of land. They developed vested interests in the existing pattern of unequal landholding and being a powerful group in the ruling Congress Party, they thwarted further attempts at agrarian or land reform. Thorner’s ‘depressor’ continued to remain in place.

However, after Independence, India’s agriculture benefited somewhat from investments in the development of irrigation and the expansion of the cultivated area, and total food grains production grew at 2.75 per cent between 1952–53 and 1964–65. But the growth in food grains production was not sufficient and could not solve food shortage. In the mid-1960s, this problem became extremely serious. It was in this context the government adopted and introduced ‘green revolution’.

The Green Revolution was introduced to make agriculture more productive by adopting new higher-yielding varieties of wheat and rice, investments in agricultural technology and agricultural education and price incentives. Although the ‘green revolution’ had a positive impact on agrarian structure in terms of the productivity of food grains, increasing the level of income in the villages, increasing real wages in agriculture and through lowering food prices (Lipton with Longhurst 1989), the major beneficiaries were the rich peasants or big landlords. They were in the best position to take advantage of the Green Revolution because the ‘green revolution’ was though technically scale neutral but not ‘resource neutral’. Such a development in Indian agriculture led to a debate among social scientists on the nature of agrarian economy or on the idea of ‘built-in depressor’ or landlordism which is widely known as ‘mode of production in Indian agriculture debate’.

Though the debate properly openrd up with a report on a sample survey of big farmers in the Punjab by Ashok Rudra, A. Majid and B. D. Talib, there are three main precursors to the debate: Sulekh Chand Gupta, G G Kotovsky and Daniel Thorner. Sulekh Chand Gupta (1962) offered an estimate of capitalist farming in agriculture in India in 1953-54. Taking as his point of departure the concentration of hired labourers on the large acrege farm units as shown in the Farm Management Studies, he noted that in the state of Uttar Pradesh the element of hired labour exceeded that of family labour on farms with 20 or more acres. Extrapolating in a conservative fashion to India as a whole, he proposed to take the number of households operating 20 acres or more as a rough approximation of the number of capitalist farms. Applying this procedure to the figures from the 1953-1954 Census of Landholding, he came up with an estimate of one-third of the total area under capitalist cultivation.

A Similar estimate was proposed by G G Kotovsky (1964). In Kotovsky's judgment the area cuiltivated wholly or mainly by hired labour in 1953-1954 amounted to 2 in Indian agriculture, but that it did5 or 30 per cent of the total for India. His conclusion was that the capitalist sector represented the leading tendency in Indian agriculture, but that it did not yet dominate.

Daniel Thorner agreed with these estimates in his articles published in The Statesmant on four successive days in November 1967. In these lively journalistic pieces Thorner related what he had just seen in a village tour which had taken him through seven states in tle Northwest, North, West, South and East of India. Whereas fifteen years previously he had been impressed by rural stagnation (Thorner 1956), this time he found alert, enterprising cultivators, eager to experiment with new scientific methods; quick to switch to power for traction and pumping; ready to invest in improvements; preferring to cultivate themselves with hired labour rather than, or in addition to, giving out their land on rent in small parcels; and able to obtain substantial increases in output. He wrote: What we are witnessing in India is the emergence of an advanced sector in agriculture that is broadly comparable to the advanced sector in modern industry. This new agriculture has been tested, has proved profitable, and is rapidly expanding. (Thorner 1980). Thorner termed new-style farming capitalist farming and cultivators gentleman farmers. . He concluded that the unprecedented wave of capitalist farnming foreshadowed new social and political as well as economic developments in India.

Rudra, Majid and Talib denied the evidence of the existence of capitalist farmers in Punjab (Rudra et al. 1969). They say that farmers in Punjab do not tend to cultivate their land themselves. They do not tend to use hired labour in a much greater proportion than family labour. They do not tend tend to use farm machines in an increasingly greater way. They do not market an important share of their agriculture produce. They do not organise their production as to yield a high rate of return on their investmens.

Utsa Patnaik demolished the findings of the report by Rudra, Majid and Talib terming their analysis of data "unhistorical" (Patnaik 1971a). Patnaik (1971a, 1971b, 1972a, 1972b) observed on the basis of data collected from that though the basic nature of agrarian economy is still non-capitalist, it has started exhibiting some features of capitalism and constitutes a small but growing class of capitalist farmers. Citing the results of her own field survey carried out in 1969 and covering 66 big farm-ers in five states Orissa, Andhra, Mysore, Madras and Gujarat - Patrnaik reported her conviction that a new class of capitalist farmers was indeed emerging. She was persuaded after going through her data that capitalist development was on the way, albeit in varying degrees, throughout the regions which she had studied.

The characteristic of the genuine capitalist, Patnaik proposes, is not appropriation of surplus value generated by wage labour nor the sale on the market of a high proportion of produce, but also - and indispensably - accumulation and reinvestment of surplus value in order to generate more surplus value on an even-expanding scale. The capitalist in agriculture can be recognised by the "degree of capital intensification": i e, growth of outlay on both constant and variable capital with respect to a given land area and, over time, a tendency towards a higher than average organic composition of capital, leading to higher productivity of land and labour.

Following the debate, scholars like A. G. Frank (1973), Gail Omvedt (1981), Dipankar Gupta (1980), Jairus Banaji (1972, 1973, 1977), Jan Breman (1985), Joan Mencher (1974), John Harriss (1979, 1982), Kathleen Gough (1980) and Paresh Chattopadhyay (1972a, 1972b) argued highlighting the existence of capitalist agrarian economy characterized by self-cultivation, monetization, mechanization, productivity orientation, propensity of profit, free wage labour, accumulation and investment in agriculture, increase in extraction of surplus value, generalized commodity production and the existence of a free market. They argued that, though the capitalist agrarian economy consisted of big farmers, there was no bonded labour or begar and bonded or attached labour-based sharecropping which are the hallmarks of landlordism. Dipankar Gupta even writes that the existence of sharecropping does not indicate the prevalence of feudalism in agriculture. It is, in fact, the sign of early stage of capitalism (Gupta 1980). Differing somewhat from this position, Krishna Bharadwaj (1974) argued that, in the post Green Revolution phase, though smallholding peasant producers became part of the process of commercialization, it was a ‘compulsive involvement in markets’. This economically weak section of the peasantry had an extremely weak bargaining position in the markets. Yet they could not avoid involving themselves in market operations. This reflects on the forced commercialisation and conditions of their distress (Bharadwaj 1985).

Contrary to the position favouring the development of capitalism in Indian agriculture, there were some scholars, namely, Amit Bhaduri (1973), Pradhan Prasad (1973, 1974), Nirmal Chandra (1974) and Ranjit Sau (1973, 1975, 1976), who argued that agrarian economy in India was semi-feudal, that is, an economic system characterized by landlordism and which is more in common with classic feudalism of the master-serf type than with industrial capitalism. They argued that agrarian economy is semi-feudal because it is characterized by landlordism and the associated features like sharecropping, perpetual indebtedness of the small tenants, concentration of two modes of exploitation, namely, usury and land ownership in the hands of the same economic class, lack of accessibility to the market for the small tenant, pervasiveness of attached workers and begar (in- or underpaid labour services), consumption loans at exorbitant rates of interest, non-monetized wage and market relations, massive underemployment, determination of small peasants to continue cultivation no matter how meagre is the returns, power oriented attitudes of the landlords, non-utilisation of resources for agricultural development and lack of accumulation of capital for investment in agriculture. Thus, the proponents of semi-feudalism thesis provided a more rigorous shape to ‘the built-in depressor’ idea of Thorner.

The idea of semi-feudalism and compulsive involvement in markets indicate the failure of land reform. Following the semi-feudalism thesis, an international group of scholars, namely, Donald Attwood, David Ludden, B. B. Chaudhuri, Meghnad Desai, Ronald Herring, Ashok Rudra, Llyod Rudolph, Sussane Rudolph and Sukhamoy Chakravarty, debated the issue of agrarian power and agricultural productivity (Desai, Rudolph, and Rudra 1984).They demonstrated the commercialization of agriculture and its unevenness across different regions of India and the variable relationship between power structures and productivity (Rudolph 1984, 12-13). Many of them advanced empirical evidence refuting the semi-feudal thesis. A critical argument for Herring was that it is the deployment of the surplus that is crucial for agricultural productivity, and that the power structure determining the form of appropriation of surplus does not determine its deployment. Herring, and many other contributors to the debate, agreed that the concentration of scarce resources in the hands of powerful agriculturalists encourage entrepreneurial risk-taking in agriculture. In the context of a modernizing agricultural sector, Herring believed that the classic inverse relationship between farm size and productivity, so often referred to as constituting an essential reason for advocating redistributive land reform, no longer holds.

Some of the contributors to the ‘mode of production’ debate who argued for the emergence of capitalist agrarian economy believed that the peasantry will be ultimately differentiated into the establishment of an agrarian capitalist class and a substantial rural proletariat. But, for Terry Byres, Indian economy is witnessing ‘partial proletarianisation’ with small and marginal producers who continue to reproduce themselves consistently. This is because, to a certain extent, many of them work outside agriculture (Byres 1981). Thus, the agricultural economy is still characterized by extensive small-scale household labour farm and household labour-based production. The ‘marginal’ operated holdings (of one hectare, or less, in extent) or household labour farm now account for around 70 per cent of the total farms. Such marginal holdings are unlikely to provide ‘enough work or income to be the main livelihood of the household’ (Hazell et al. 2007, 1).

This point is also proven in the findings of the Foundation for Agrarian Studies from village surveys in Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. In fact, the net annual incomes from crop production of very many such households were actually negative (Ramachandran and Rawal 2010; see also Basole and Basu 2011, 75). These households reproduce themselves now as a result of migration and of the remittances associated with it, and of increasing employment in non-farm sector but still within the rural economy.

The significance of labour migration in this respect is highlighted, for example, by Gerry and Janine Rodgers in their study of two Bihar villages (Rodgers and Rodgers 2011), in Jan Breman’s studies of the ‘footloose proletariat’ of south Gujarat (Breman2007) and in a re-study of a Tamil village by John Harriss, Jeyaranjan, and Nagaraj (2010). The National Commission on Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector indicates that the number of seasonal migrants is of the order of 30 million, while Jan Breman suggests that it is likely to be closer to 60 million. Some estimates suggest that there may be as many as 100 million migrant workers in the country (Harriss 2013). Therefore, Henry Bernstein has argued that the dominance of capital today is no longer expressed in ‘classic’ capital–labour relations. He suggests that there are ‘classes of labour’ pursuing their reproduction ‘through insecure and oppressive – and typically increasingly scarce – wage employment and/or a range of likewise precarious small-scale and insecure “informal sector” (“survival”) activity, including farming’ (Bernstein 2008, cited in Harriss 2013, 358). As a result of these processes, the differentiation and polarization of peasant classes has nearly frozen.

However, Vikas Rawal (2008), using data from the 59th round of the National Sample Survey (NSS) for 2003–04, shows that 31 per cent of rural households are landless, and another 30 per cent own less than 0.4 hectare or about one acre of land, while only a little over 5 per cent of households own more than three hectares and just 0.52 per cent own more than 10 hectares. He argues that the absolute numbers and the relative share in the rural population of landless households have been increasing, so differentiation has not frozen entirely. Comparing the data from 2003–04 and 1992 NSS rounds he suggests that there has been an increase of as much as six percentage points in landlessness, while inequality in landownership also increased. There is an argument that the increase in landlessness and inequality in landownership have further gone ahead with economic reforms in 1991. This is because in the phase of economic reforms the costs of cultivation has phenomenally gone up along with a drastic decline in the public investment in agricultural infrastructure and research. Besides, economic reforms have facilitated commercialisation of agriculture and contract farming.

The issue of the nature of agrarian economy – whether it is characterized by semi-feudalism or landlordism and associated features like big landlords, bonded or attached labour and attached labour-based sharecropping or by capitalist farmers indulging in self-cultivation – has not yet been settled. There are many works which suggest that the introduction of land reforms and New Agricultural Strategies from Green Revolution to contract farming and the phenomenal growth in population have stamped out landlordism from rural India. To quote Gupta, ‘With the abolition of landlordism and the introduction of adult franchise (the two must necessarily go hand in hand), old social relations that dominated the country side are today in a highly emaciated form, when not actually dead. Roughly 85 per cent of landholdings are below five acres and about 63 per cent are below even three acres. What land reforms and land redistribution could not do, demography and subdivision of holdings have done to land ownership. Where are the big landlords? There are some, but they are few and far between’ (Gupta 2005, 752). According to Harriss, the share of leased-in land in the total operated area, according to the NSS, declined from only 10.7 per cent in 1960–1 to just 6.5 per cent in the kharif (summer) season of 2002–3 (Harriss 2013). This apart, it is being also argued that the decline of landlordism can also be substantiated by the decreasing importance of land as a factor of dominance in the villages. To quote S. B. Singh, ‘The importance of land as a factor of livelihood and dominance is decreasing and other factors of production are becoming more important . . . more and more people are losing interest in village affairs. The urge to dominate over the lower castes always had a political-economic angle, and once the locus of the economy has partially shifted away from the village, the tendency to dominate is beginning to wither away’ (Singh 2005, 3173). Jeffrey Witsoe, from another village in Bihar, reports that Rajputs were/are the biggest landholding caste in the village. ‘Over the last two decades, Rajput dominance was replaced by the emergence of multiple power centres’ (Witsoe 2011, 625). In this case, the decline of Rajput dominance has had to do with the income earned outside agriculture and outside the village. Alongside these developments, there has been the emergence of a new and very different generation of local leaders, as Krishna (2003) has explained with regard to rural Rajasthan, from amongst the educated but often unemployed younger men, including some from a Dalit background.

However, there are some studies that argue otherwise. Rawal, using data from NSS for 2003–4, shows that there are a good number of landlords in rural India who own substantial portion of land in the villages and the rural India is witnessing an increasing inequality in landownership (Rawal 2008). V. K. Ramachandran et al. (2010) and Vamsi Vakulabharanam et al. (2011) have reported that in coastal Andhra Pradesh villages absentee landlordism and tenancy have been, in fact, increasing. Ramachandran et.al show not only the resurgence of landlordism in coastal Andhra Pradesh, but also the persistence of the landed wealth and power of Reddys, Kammas and Kapus in different parts of the state (Ramachandran et al. 2010).

Breman has made a similar point from his observations in a village in south Gujarat. He opines that in the village of Gandevigam, Anavil Brahmans, historically the landlords of the locality, ‘told me that the current generation of Kolis, who formerly were their share-cropping tenants, would not be willing to subordinate themselves as sharecroppers. But in confidential conversations the Kolis clearly expressed their frustrations about the undiminished hegemony and obstinacy of the Anavil Brahmans, large farmers. They admit that there is little else they can do in the shadow of this higher caste than to try to find adequate space to promote their own interests and autonomy’ (Breman 2007, 37).

According to Harriss (2006), traces of classic landlordism have remained in Sahajapur, a West Bengal village. Surinder Jodhka reports that in Punjab there are new ‘political entrepreneurs’, though not necessarily rich, but they are ‘are invariably from upper or dominant caste groups’ (2011, 16). The dominant castes’, according to the definition of this term given by M.N. Srinivas, are the castes who have huge control over land in the village. In northern Karnataka, according to Jonathan Pattenden, the Karnataka Farmers’ Movement was in fact ‘usually . . . controlled by dominant caste men often engaged in perpetuating caste and gender-based forms of domination in their villages’ (Pattenden 2005, 1979). Pattenden argues that ‘whilst traditional forms of control over the labouring class [inherent in the caste hierarchy: JH] have been eroded, gatekeeping increasingly allows the dominant class to exert more subtle forms of political control, which in turn facilitates processes of accumulation’ (Pattenden 2011, 164). Thus, on the basis of these studies, one can say that in rural India those who have historically been poor have loosened ties of dependence on landlords, but overall they still exercise very little leverage over the political space. Besides, there will be huge difficulties with generalizations about the decline of dominance based on land control.

The issue of landlordism or semi-feudalism in Indian countryside is also politically significant because all major Left-wing political parties of India – the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)), the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI (Maoist)) – continue to believe that rural India is still significantly characterized by ‘landlordism’. This belief is the basis of their understanding of the agrarian question. They also claim that the successive central and provincial governments have largely overlooked the issue of landlordism and, therefore, have failed to resolve the agrarian question. Such ideas are widely prevalent in their programmes related documents. The Programme of the CPI (M) illustrates this point by observing:

3.15 The agrarian question continues to be the foremost national question before the people of India. Its resolution requires revolutionary change, including radical and thoroughgoing agrarian reforms that target abolition of landlordism, moneylender-merchant exploitation and caste and gender oppression in the countryside.

3.16 After independence, instead of abolishing landlordism, the Congress rulers adopted agrarian policies to transform the semi-feudal landlords into capitalist landlords and develop a stratum of rich peasants. The legislative measures for abolishing the old statutory landlordism permitted them to get huge compensation and retain big amounts of land …. Land ceiling laws provided sufficient loopholes to maintain large holdings intact. The record of the Congress party is one of monumental betrayal of the historic opportunity for rural transformation.

3.19 If the development of capitalist relations in agriculture is clearly the major all India trend, it is equally evident that … there are regions where old forms of landlordism and tenancy and archaic forms of labour service, servitude and bondage still play an important part in agrarian relations …. Capitalist development in Indian agriculture is not based on a resolute destruction of older forms, but has been superimposed on a swamp of pre-capitalist production relations and forms of social organisation. (CPI (M) Party Programme: http://www.cpim.org/party-programme#VI)

The CPI Party Programme also reveals that landlordism is still extensively widespread in rural or agrarian India. Some of the lines in its Programme are as follows:

6.3 Congress party continued its alliance with the landlords as well as the dislodged rulers of princely states…. The landlords were also given an opportunity to become capitalist (farmer) landlords and evict thousands of “tenants-at-will” in the name of resuming self-cultivation.

6.4 Land reforms were also sabotaged due to bourgeois government’s compromising with landlord elements in the country.

6.14 Absentee landlords continue to exist extensively in Bihar and in some other parts, especially in the Hindi belt. The Bihar Land Reform Commission constituted in 2006 prepared a list of big landlords clandestinely holding thousands of acres of land and running a shadow Zamindary system. (CPI Party Programme: http://www.communistparty.in/p/party-programme.html)

The position of CPI (Maoist) on this issue is well established. The Party believes that India is a semi-feudal country with widespread landlordism. Its Party Programme states this point in the following sentences:

14. … the comprador big capitalist and feudal ruling classes of India, introduced some changes in land relations in the name of abolishing feudalism after 1947 …. But the monopoly over land by big landlords continues to remain as such while the vast population of the landless and poor peasants remains deprived of the land.

…. Extreme forms of semi-feudal exploitation are still prevalent in the countryside. The major prevailing forms of such exploitation are extortion of their produce through share cropping, which is robbing them of their produce up to 50%, bonded labour, usurious and merchant capital and other forms of extra-economic coercion. The most vicious form of extracting surplus through extra-economic coercion was through the caste system. Here the artisan and service castes had to serve the landed gentry and priests for a nominal fee. The scheduled castes continued to be treated as near slaves contributing even free labour and services in the name of "begar" etc.

…. The countryside is dominated by landlords, usurers, merchants and religious institutions. These exploiting sections are the mainstay of the semi-feudal relations of production in the country.

15. …. Despite some changes in the areas of the ‘Green Revolution’, no significant change has occurred in the semi-feudal relations of India as a whole. (CPI (Maoist) Party Programme: http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/maoist/documents/papers/partyprogram.htm).