Most writers of rural India have taken the idea of village autonomy and autarchy for granted, categorizing the village as a standalone community, with limited interaction with the wider economic, political and religious systems. More recently, questions have been raised about the idea of a nucleated village, with clear boundaries between one village and another. Migration patterns, farmer suicides and stagnating rural incomes, along with increasingly ad hoc land acquisition in the name of public good, have politicized the idea of rural economics. Is a village simply a vertical economic unit composed of various castes, bound by ties of kinship, marriage and economic obligations?
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Or should we consider its deep dependence on towns for specialized services (construction, transportation, healthcare, education, etc.) as part of the hinterland’s paradigm? How does economic policy at the village level result in sustainable and growing per capita income, while providing essential services and a safety net? How can agriculture be revived in an era of fragmented landholdings and rising input and fuel prices?
Does the rural economy offer enough opportunities to quell rising discontent? Why does construction offer the only hope for rural youth, bereft as they are of any transferable skills in an urban context?
Furthermore, we need a national conversation on rural distress. Much like the decline of the peasant, the interest of historians and social policy observers has also dwindled with regard to capturing their fate.
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India’s rich history has been illustrated with a range of tomes about kings, queens, nawabs and soldiers, and in some cases, even traders—and yet, the peasant himself, and the village economy he sustains, have drawn limited attention. As Eric Stokes, the most famed of agrarian historians at Cambridge, recognized, ‘the balance of destiny in South Asia rests in peasant hands.’ The challenge, however, has been to capture the travails and tragedies of a social group that resists classification and leaves little, if any, records. The 1970s and ’80s saw renewed focus on empirical research that sought to provide a historical reconstruction of our agrarian economy, seeking correlations and dependencies on a range of social factors and social groups. In India, the history of land, especially in rural India, has somehow not gone alongside the history of capital,
subsuming documentation about changes in the rural economy under the dialectic between capitalist development and the proletarian masses. Unlike during the Champaran Satyagraha, national attention has been curiously lacking. We must empathize with India’s marginal farmers and we must make the choice to support them.
Policymaking in a country riven by rural poverty, social fault lines and inadequate infrastructure should be focused on alleviating rural hardships while building the infrastructure for future growth. The pursuit of grandiose urban infrastructure, and gigantic symbolic statues is a luxury for other nations. This book hopes, through a series of vignettes, to elucidate such issues, with their constraints and potential solutions. It hopes to highlight experiences from my decade-long public life, serving as a Member of Parliament (MP) for mostly rural constituencies, while drawing lessons from sociological experts and development policy. This set of experiences has been distilled into a rural manifesto, one that could help to shift the contours of the rural economy towards a more positive bearing for the marginal farmer.
In writing this heartfelt and, perhaps, timely set of essays on the village economy, I am deeply indebted to India’s rich tradition of agricultural economists and agrarian historians, whose contribution is recognized through footnotes scattered across pages. Writing this book has been a learning experience for me as well, helping me understand India’s rhythm, particularly of its villages and the aspirations of those living in them. I have travelled far and wide, across a multitude of Indian towns, villages and habitations, and everywhere I have heard stories of sorrow and yet been witness to the generosity and resilience that rural Indians possess. I have drawn on the resources and goodwill of a variety of people, including my research team.
Finally, my mother and my wife have lent unstinting emotional and intellectual support, while providing me with a sense of empathy for the downtrodden. It is to them, and my daughter, that I dedicate this book.