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9 Soc. Change 3 (1979)

handle is hein.journals/sclcnge9 and id is 1 raw text is: Social Change : March-June 1979 Lessons of Indian Village Studies on Rural Development G. Parthasarathy Parthasarathy, G. and Krishnamurthy, L., Changes in Rural Society: A Case Study of Pathikonda Village, Chittoor District, Andhra Pradesh, Agricultural Economics Research Centre, University of Madras, 1962. 2. Haswell, M.R., The Economic of Developnent of Village India. London: 1967. See Chapter II, Eruvellipet, (South Arcot District), pp. 11-17. The objects of this paper are two-fold: (a) to highlight the nature of contradictions in Indian rural economy as seen from village surveys and resurveys, and (b) to review alternative perspectives on rural development, Insights From Village Studies The village studies conducted by the Agro-Economic Centres, of which most remain unpublished, offer illuminating insights into the nature of contradictions. For the purposes of illustration, 1 choose the resurveys of Pathikonda village with which I was associated. The repeat survey of this semi-tribal Boya village shows how, under the conditions of primitive accumulation, commercialisation in the form of an impressive shift to groundnut crop led neither to development of land, nor to the improvement of the well-being of the poor in the village, while wealth accumulated in the hands of a few households. In the past, it was the Boyas poligars to immigrant Lingayal money-lender family, the Boyas of the village have been turned into tenants. The surpluses of the peasants were appropriated by the Lingayat family which used it for further accumulation of land both within the village and in neighbouring village. The shift to groundnut crop in the region brought the trading families into the village who lent the finances for consumption and acquired the groundnut crop in return towards loan and interest. Neither rental surpluses nor trading surpluses went into the improvement of land. Demographic pressures, however, extended the frontiers of cultivation to current and old fallows. Land continued to be poor-yielding, returning rewards inadequate even for survival; no new wells were constructed. The tenants did not have the resources. The owners found moneylending more profitable than entrepreneurship. The peasant and the labourer driven by poverty had to depend upon stonecutting and woodcutting for survival, while agriculture suffered, leaving the people much poorer. The benefits of integration with the wider market through commercialisation were effectively intercepted by the landlord-money-lender-trader combine, while the masses continued to eke out miserable livings from poorly endowed resources of the village. The process of primitive accumulation and its impact in relation to the poor is also illustrated in the resurveys of Slater villages by M.R. Haswell. Heswell described the richest landholder who started with 32.6 hectares and increased his landholding to 162 hectares in his generation, of which he cultivated about 81 with the labour of Pandiyals and sub-let the rest in Eruvellipet village of Chingelput district. In 1961, Eruvellipet had its plutocrat who had 202 hectares, half of which he cultivated and half he sub-let. Land Reform Legislation did not bother him. Haswell's study of Eruvellipet brings out quite clearly that that village had considerable peasant surpluses. But these were extracted as rent by the leading landlord. Whether the villagaer worked as his tenant or as a labourer on farm, his rewards were the same, i.e., at the minimum level of subsistence, and over a long period between 1916 and 1961, these show no significant changes.2 Tenants continue to be hardly better off than traditional serfs tied to the landlord by debt, though average product in 1961 indicated that the soils of Eruvellipet are highly productive and that output is sufficient to maintain the existing population at an income significantly higher than the subsistence minimum. The adverse impact of big landlordism is seen in the levels ofliteracy in the village. At the time of independence, the rate of literacy in Eruvellipet was only three per cent. Whatever modernisation of agriculture that was noticed on the farm of the big landlord in the sixties was at the expense of the tenants and labourers. 3

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