AGRARIAN CHANGE IN INDIA

Despite its steady growth during the post-Independence period, agriculture in India has been progressively shrinking in terms of its contribution to the national income. However, it continues to provide a source of livelihood and employment to a large proportion of Indians. Its social worth even in 21st-century India remains far greater than its economic value. Given its demographic and social weight, it remains crucial for policy makers. Further, in countries like India and the larger universe of the Global South, agrarian economies function within a variety of complex relational structures, shaped by local histories and the broader processes of their political economies. Thus, the question of agrarian change is as much about social transformation as it is about economic growth. India presents a fascinating example of such a process. Despite a common political history, trajectories of agrarian change vary widely across regions of the country. Social science scholarship on the subject has also been extremely rich and varied. Changes in Indias economic paradigm in the early 1990s shifted the states focus away from agriculture, leaving it largely to the vagaries of the market. This posed a huge challenge for the agricultural sector, particularly for those with small and marginal holdings. The accelerated integration of agriculture with the national and global markets, prompted by the introduction of newer technologies, has also been the source of a social and cultural fragmentation of rural life, a weakening of kinship ties, and produced a general crisis of its economy. This volume is a selection of seminal readings, published in the Economic and Political Weekly by some of the leading scholars of the field. They present extensive and in-depth research on agrarian economy, its social structures and their transformations over the past century. The book is an invaluable resource for students, teachers, researchers and policy actors, as also readers who wish to understand the fascinating and complex dynamics of the Indian agrarian scene and its contemporary history.