Agriculture modernisation and petty producers in India: A case study of two villages

Abstract

Agriculture modernisation in India with green revolution as its main pillar has a gone a long way in transforming the agriculture sector. Two decades of green revolution with a heavy emphasis on state intervention was withdrawn in the early 1990s to start what is called as the age of ‘liberalised green revolution’ (Karamchedu, 2021). In this paper, I try to examine the case of two villages in South India which has traversed through these changes and how the small farm dominated agrarian scene in the villages have changed over the years. The data used in this paper has been collected from the villages of Veerasambanu and Vinayagapuram in 2018 which had been previously studied in 1994 thus giving us room for an inter-temporal comparison.

With the advent of the green revolution, agriculture in the study villages got incorporated into the circuits of capitalist production. Though green revolution technologies had a positive effect on farmers in the initial years, the long-run consequences of this on the petty producer-dominated agriculture scenario is seen to be less desirable. The high extraction of groundwater using bore wells has taken a toll on the local ecology and the agrarian environment. The competitive digging and deepening of bore wells caused the water table to go down in the study villages. This is indicative of the expansion of agrarian capitalism at the cost of ecological damage.

The study finds that agriculture in the study villages is engulfed in a prolonged crisis resultant from a complex interplay of neo-liberal policies, worsening ecology, and changing climatic patterns. This stalemate caused crop production in the villages to turn unprofitable. When the crop yields had only increased minimally during 1994-2018, the cost of production witnessed a major escalation. Though this applies to all farms, the degree of its impact differed by the specific crop cultivated and the class position of the farmers. This has resulted in an unprecedented income squeeze for the farmers.

Agricultural modernisation in India was expected to create class polarisation and gradual doom of the small farmers. However, despite the heavy odds faced in crop production, the small farmers in the study villages are still surviving. The study finds that the working of social institutions has a great role in keeping the small farmers afloat. On the whole, the agrarian transformation initiated by the modernisation drive in India is ecologically and socially embedded. While ecological embeddedness puts limits to sustainable livelihood generation in the sector, the social embeddedness of the village economies and lack of gainful alternative employment ensure that petty farming goes more or less unfettered even amidst distress.