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The Covid‐19 lockdown in India in March 2020 revealed the presence of Adivasi communities in the marine fishing industry of Goa, a coastal state in India. While the migration for work of Adivasi communities from the central regions of the country is well recorded, their movement across geographies of the forest and the coast is relatively unknown. Working with initial data collected during the lockdown, interviews conducted after the pandemic and using secondary materials, the paper sought to understand the social and material conditions in the forest and the coastal regions that shape this movement. Centring the waged relation of Adivasi workers opened the door to thinking about the marine fishing sector in India as a capitalist industry, while paying attention to social reproduction highlighted how the coastal and forest regions are spatially linked through their movement and labour. This highlights that the coasts and forests are going through distinct processes of capitalist intensification and expansion. Making connections between ecological appropriation, historical processes of resource extraction and marginalization, the paper finds that the extraction of fish resources in Goa is made productive through the hierarchization and differentiation of Adivasi workers. It reveals how the social relations of identity and caste mediate access to and define conditions of work at sea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Madhya Pradesh, India, rural migrant workers hired in flyover's construction yards experiment a space of work where the social practices relating to caste separation and hierarchy are temporally softened. This paper shows that these processes of conviviality, through mixing between castes and trans‐communitarian work identities based on the hierarchies of labour, are taking part in the lower classes' long quest for less oppressive labour relations. Starting from the construction yard, and then going to the village, this paper shows that the labour relations involved in the circulation of rural migrants to the flyover construction yards are contributing to shaping their complex and flexible social consciousness in a context of slow reconfiguration of oppressive rural labour relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is concerned with the contemporary relevance of caste to agrarian capitalism and the relations of dependency and allegiance it fosters in a village of Andhra Pradesh. It deploys the method of village study to examine the two‐way interaction between agrarian class and caste relations and the emerging rural‐based informal nonfarm economy. It elaborates the continuation of relations of debt, dependency, and political allegiance fostered by landlordism despite significant diversification to nonfarm by landlords and labour and identifies the crucial role of land inequality and the working of ritual hierarchy in locking Dalit caste in land‐based relations of dependency. The paper highlights the importance of expanding the definition of landlordism as the use of social power for accumulation by embedding it in the motives and values generated by the Hindu social order. While the new wave of literature focuses attention on global capital and commodity chains to understand differentiation of rural population and ruralities, the paper emphasizes the persistent significance of landholding provincial capital in shaping class/caste relations and rural politics and argues for a course correction in thinking about the processes of globalization and new forms of labour control and stresses the continuing significance of the agrarian question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Gang Canal region of Rajasthan, the cropping pattern changed from a labour intensive crop, cotton, to a mechanized crop, cluster beans. The shift in cropping pattern not only displaced workers from farm wage work but also brought changes in labour hiring contracts with large scale conversion of daily wage rate contracts to piece‐rate contracts. Drawing on a primary survey in a village from Gang Canal region, the paper examines the change in the agrarian relations in rural Rajasthan by analysing the emerging development in the rural labour relations. For piece‐rate work in farm wage work in some parts of Rajasthan, the wage rate is unilaterally decided by the landlords and large capitalist farmers and is denoted as the ‘village rate’. The manual workers have negligible bargaining power vis‐à‐vis the village rate. The conversion of daily wage rate contracts to piece‐rate contracts has enhanced the duration of working day that involves a rise in the rate of surplus value. Access and availability of low wage labour facilitates the accumulation of capital. With the limited availability of employment in the non‐farm sector (in both public and private sectors), workers are compelled to sell their labour power at wages that do not exceed the level of subsistence. The paper concludes with a brief examination of continuum of coercion and varied degree of unfreedom among worker in the village. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a traumatic lockdown in 2020, India's migrant factory workers have headed back to work and on worse terms than before. Struggling with new levels of denial of entitlements, workers respond by withdrawing from their fragile hold on formality, moving instead further into the informal sector. Based on voice notes recorded on Saajha Manch, a phone‐based community media platform, the paper examines workers' experience that their efforts to claim their rights lure them into a quagmire in a bureaucracy which sucks their energy while assuring no clear outcome. Seeing evidence of failed enforcement and structural inequality all around them, workers conclude that the law is not meant for them and hence show little interest in the new labour codes hastily enacted at the height of the pandemic. The paper highlights the dysfunction of the formal sector in delivering to its low‐waged workers who remain unserved in spite of registration and documentation in place. As they join the ranks of informality, however, migrant factory workers do not lose interest in associative and contentious activity. On the contrary, freedom from the bureaucracy of rights may be a boost to new forms of struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to decentre/decolonize our understanding of capitalist development in the Global South call for more complex and differentiated categories of work that acknowledge the significance of both non‐waged and reproductive labour. These categories would allow us to more clearly 'see' the varying intersections of gender, class and caste within this world of work. Even as the literature on work in the Global South acknowledges the importance of forms of non‐waged work, there is still more work to be done to sufficiently incorporate the labour of social reproduction. In this paper, which emerges from an effort to apply a feminist social reproduction lens in the field, we propose understanding work through four conceptual dyads: waged productive labour, non‐waged productive labour, waged reproductive labour and non‐waged reproductive labour. Through an in‐depth description of three specific cases from a time‐use survey we conducted in rural Punjab, India, we argue not only that all four dyads are required to encompass the world of work but also that this more expansive conceptualization can help us produce richer analyses of the intersections of class, caste and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on agrarian change in India has largely employed class categories based upon data on land, assets and occupational status, which collapse women's class relations into those of (mostly male) households heads. In this paper, we interrogate this understanding of class building on the work of Carmen Diana Deere. Employing the first ever national time use survey conducted in India in 2019, we interrogate class as a labour process that intersects with caste and gender. Our analysis of the data using a Marxist‐feminist framework suggests the following. First, there exist intra‐household gendered differences in class locations. This calls to question theoretical frameworks that assign a cohesive class location to all household members that underlie data collection in India and elsewhere. Second, individuals participate in multiple labour processes depending on their caste and gender. Hence, they may be subsumed to capital in varied and sometimes contradictory ways. Finally, we find that both men and women engage in reproductive labour in addition to other forms of labour, which varies by caste categories. This finding further underscores and supports previous research on the importance of an expanded conception of work that includes reproductive labour. In sum, we argue for a more complex understanding of class in India, one that incorporates its caste and gender dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do farmers' collectives, which pool land, labour, capital, and skills to create medium‐sized production units, offer a more viable model of farming for resource‐constrained smallholders than individual family farms? A participatory action research project in Eastern India and Nepal provides notable answers. Groups of marginal and tenant farmers, catalysed by the project, evolved into four different collective models with varying levels of cooperation, gender composition, and land ownership/tenancy status. Based on 3 years of action research, this paper examines how the models evolved and their differential outcomes. All groups have gained from cultivating contiguous plots in their efficiency of labour and machine use for land preparation and irrigation, and from economies in input purchase. Several collectives of tenant farmers have also enhanced their bargaining power vis‐a‐vis an entrenched landlord class and thus been able to negotiate lower rents and refuse long‐standing feudal obligations. However, the models differ in their extent of economic gain and their ability to handle gender inequalities and conflicts over labour sharing. The paper explores the historical, regional, and cultural factors that could explain such differences across the models. It thus offers unique insights into the processes, benefits, and challenges of farmers' collectives and provides pointers for replication and further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with debates around microcredit, once a development success story, but now much critiqued. Arguing that microcredit can only be understood within the wider context of debt, we draw on ethnographic material from two villages in Tamil Nadu, to examine how microcredit through self‐help groups sits within a broader context of indebtedness among the rural labouring classes. We describe patterns and sources of borrowing among the poor, the ways in which debts are managed, negotiated and settled within households and the ways in which the management of debt is mediated by gender, caste, class and aspiration. The paper calls for a more nuanced understanding of debt: some debts are seen as 'good' and others as 'bad'. We explore the ways in which microcredit, channelled through self‐help groups, is—against much contemporary criticism—perceived by women borrowers in our study villages as a source of 'good debt' and praised as an enabling factor in their everyday household management as well as in aspirations for mobility and development. We also argue that microcredit can have positive impacts by enabling social investments that enhance status and reduce dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1990s Chilika Lake saw a conflict over aquaculture practices that culminated in a process of de facto privatization of the lake waters and the implementation of illegal shrimp cultivation. An earlier article explored the class dynamics of the conflict and the present paper, based on a 2015 fieldwork revisit, reviews the unfolding of the socioeconomic dynamics underlying the illegal aquaculture activities. Looking at recent developments in the implementation of illegal shrimp cultivation in the lake, it interrogates the underlying balance between coercion and consent, and the implications for the livelihoods and protest politics of the fishing people. The paper draws attention to the reality of occupational displacement, analysing its implications for the viability of the fisher people's oppositional movement. Through doing so, it draws renewed attention to the complexity of state–society relations underlying the dynamics that govern conflict and critically contributes to recent debates on subaltern politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at a case of rural‐to‐rural movement of agrarian capital in southern India and the ways in which capital–labour relations are reworked to maintain oppressive forms of exploitation. Faced with an agrarian crisis, capitalist farmers from affluent communities of Wayanad, Kerala, take large tracts of land for lease in the neighbouring state of Karnataka and grow ginger based on price speculation. Landless Adivasis from Wayanad have served as labourers on these ginger farmlands for the past three decades. Recently, farmers have shifted to employing labourers from a Scheduled Caste (SC) from Karnataka. The change happened not just because of the lower wages the SC labourers were willing to work for but also because of the farmers' inclination to move away from Adivasis who have been resisting the poor working conditions on the farm. The story resonates with the broader dynamics of agrarian–labour relations amidst capitalist expansion and highlights the centrality of socio‐political factors at play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an empirical exercise carried out in five villages of Odisha in eastern India, the paper looks into ageing of the farm population and the experiences and responses of farmers of various age groups to farming. The findings of the study indicate that agriculture is greying, farmers are getting older and the youth, particularly of higher and cultivating castes, are averse to farming. The unwillingness of these youths to join farming is mainly attributed to loss of social status, declining profitability in agriculture and discouragement of immediate 'mentors', the middle‐aged farmers, caused by the perpetual decline of farm income and loss of social recognition. The hitherto nonfarming youths, belonging to scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and service‐rendering castes, especially the female youths, are joining farming to fill this gap, mostly as leased‐in cultivators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political economy of agricultural policies - why certain interventions may be preferred by political leaders rather than others - is well recognized. This paper explores a perspective that has previously been neglected: the political economy of the agricultural statistics. In developing economies, the data on agricultural production are weak. Because these data are assembled using competing methods and assumptions, the final series are subject to political pressure, particularly when the government is subsidizing agricultural inputs. This paper draws on debates on the evidence of a Green Revolution in India and the arguments on the effect of withdrawing fertilizer subsidies during structural adjustment in Nigeria, and finally the paper presents new data on the effect of crop data subsidies in Malawi. The recent agricultural census (2006/7) indicates a maize output of 2.1 million metric tonnes, compared to the previously widely circulated figures of 3.4 million metric tonnes. The paper suggests that 'data' are themselves a product of agricultural policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper questions the orthodox Marxist view of merchant capital as "unproductive," by highlighting the importance of traders in subsuming the countryside to the logic of capital. However, it also argues that in order to properly understand the role played by traders in agrarian change, critical Marxist scholarship on merchant capital needs to recognize the complex marketing systems in which traders and farmers operate. These markets have their own internal relations, organizational and institutional logic which in turn is tied to the specificity of the commodity. Using wheat markets in colonial Punjab as a case study, it then utilizes the framework of complex marketing systems to highlight the range of firms and farms that operated in these markets; the importance of personal relations and informal institutions of family, caste, and religion for establishing trust; and the class stratified nature of market participants. It was from within these informally organized markets that commercial capital first emerged in colonial Punjab. By creatively combining the concept of commercial capital with markets as complex systems, it hopes to provide a richer framework for the study of agrarian change in diverse contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active land markets in the periphery of Chennai have resulted in large tracts of agricultural land being bought by non‐agricultural actors seeking returns primarily from speculation. We argue in this paper that the financialization of land and consequent spurt of agricultural land sales are central to what scholars have termed land grab. Recent literature on land grabs has focused primarily on processes of accumulation by dispossession and the coercive role of the state. Our contention is that land grabs more commonly occur due to the state underinvesting in agriculture, resulting in "dispossession by neglect" of especially marginal and small farmers. Dispossession by neglect better captures the fluid boundary between the coercive and voluntary in contemporary land grabs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how young male Dalit labourers negotiate the changes and continuities of labour relations in the construction industry, and power relations in rural Telangana in southern India. It looks at the fluidity between three segments of the classes of labour, namely debt-bonded, unskilled/self-employed and educated labourers. It examines how Dalit youths' experiences and representations of labour circulation and political clientelism shape and are shaped by the articulation between the construction industry and rural leaders, and by class, family, caste and generational relations in the village. Two points are made. First, circulation at the bottom of the labour hierarchy prevents labourers (even educated ones) to accumulate capital and participate in collective action: rather, the total lack of protection at work has brought about renewed and graded forms of dependence and political clientelism. Second, circulation serves as a locus that fosters and segments young male Dalit labourers' quests for respect, but hinders them from getting involved in political competition against rural leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to understand why debates and controversies on agricultural water use in India have taken a bipolar form, characterized by clamours and silences, and in which, paradoxically, Indian agricultural water governance and policy has shifted very little in response to the extremely vibrant and intensive public debate and action on water resources. The paper identifies the technical features of water control systems and the institutional features of the Indian (water) governance structure as the material conditions of that polarization and the source of the deadlock. I argue that the form and content of agricultural water use debates and struggles reflect and help to reproduce their material conditions of existence rather than to transform them. The analysis presented here may help to resolve the paradox and suggest new avenues and emphases for critical analysis and public action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of food regimes, as developed by Friedmann and McMichael, has proven useful in analysing how systems of food production, distribution, and consumption are linked to cycles of global capital accumulation and identifying the contradictions and conflicts that underlie them. A question that food regime analysis is relatively less able to address, however, is how food regimes become established and endure with the apparent acquiescence of those who are the victims of their contradictions and inequities. In this paper, I argue that a deeper engagement with Gramsci's theory of hegemony may help to address this lacuna in food regime analysis. To illustrate my case, I draw on studies of rural India from the colonial period to the present day, highlighting the ways in which the hegemonic mechanisms of consent and coercion have been crucial to the consolidation of each of the three food regimes identified by Friedmann and McMichael. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the national and transnational character of mobilization against GM crops in India, South Africa and Brazil in the ten-year period to 2005. By examining the contexts and practices of mobilization across the three countries, and in particular the complex, often fraught, local and global connections, the paper examines the diverse mobilizations that have occurred. The paper argues that to understand these processes, particular national political and economic contexts must be appreciated, alongside how the GM debates articulate with other foci for activism and the complex and often fragile nature of alliances that make up activist networks. The paper shows how the debate about GM crops has become a much wider one: about the future of agriculture and small-scale farmers, about corporate control and property rights and about the rules of global trade. In sum, a debate not just about the pros and cons of a particular set of technologies, but about politics and values and the future of agrarian society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of a 'good farmer' who adheres to scientific methods of crop production and produces high yields was commonly articulated by scientists and some farmers in Malwa, central India, while evaluating soybean farming. However, through detailed ethnographic description of the everyday practices of soybean farmers in Malwa, this paper argues that there is no direct link between scientific methods and high productivity, defined as yield per unit of land, because the outcome is dependent on variables that cannot be controlled by farmers. Rather, the metaphor of a 'good farmer' was selectively used by upper-caste farmers to reinforce their power and authority in the face of declining state support to emphasize their continued importance to agriculture and the state. When upper-caste farmers were less productive, they placed the blame on the environment, but when lower-caste farmers produced less, the blame was placed on their (lack of) capability to understand scientific techniques that were expected to increase productivity. This paper suggests that instead of using the productivity discourse to evaluate farming, a different valuation reveals the positive contribution of soybean as a poor farmer's crop due to its agronomic characteristics and market environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an object of ethnographic enquiry, this paper explores the significance of the modes of production debates for the radical Left in India. Its aim is modest: to investigate whether the analysis of the Indian economy by the underground Communist Party of India ( Maoist), or the Naxalites, maps on to agrarian transformations in the heart of their revolutionary struggle, in one of their guerrilla zones in Jharkhand. The Maoist concern with the agrarian question is shown to be first and foremost an issue of politics, determining their strategy and tactics; the question of identifying who is the 'enemy', who to form alliances with and how to progress the struggle. A principal contradiction is established by the Maoists as being that between feudalism and the masses. Analysing the political economy of the hills and forests of Jharkhand, this paper reveals first how feudal relations were not established there. Second, it shows the persistence of non-capitalist relations of production in farming. And, third, it illuminates the emergence of class differentiation through processes that bypass the development of capitalism in agriculture. The argument is that it is the modern state itself that has played a crucial role in these slow processes of class differentiation in the Adivasi-dominated hills and forests of India. Analysing the agrarian transition in this guerrilla zone, this paper offers a critical analysis of Maoist strategy and tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-interrogates the positions on the agrarian question in India, to reach fresh conclusions about important agrarian policies of the Left, including that of land reforms. Internationally, the classical political economy approach to agrarian transitions has been challenged by positions arguing (a) that neoliberalism and the international corporate food regime have led to a new dominant contradiction between the peasantry and multinational agribusiness or (b) that the agrarian question for capital has been bypassed. It is shown that most analyses of the agrarian question in India, including those of Indian Left parties, tend to adhere either to the classical political economy approach, or their analyses are close to the peasantry versus the corporate food regime approach. In spite of this, it is here argued that an empirical analysis of agrarian transition in India lends credence to some aspects of the third position; that is, the argument that the agrarian question for capital has been bypassed. The paper finishes with a discussion of the political implications of this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a number of case studies from Tamil Nadu, this paper shows that bonded labour is not a relic of the past, but surprisingly contemporary. Refuting the tenets of the semi-feudal thesis, we argue that unfree labour can go hand in hand with capitalism, and that it can be initiated and sustained by capital itself in order to accumulate surplus value. Going against the tenets of the de-proletarianization thesis, we suggest that bonded labour is not always the preferred working arrangement for capitalism. Bonded labour should be examined in connection with specific historical contexts, the changing nature of the economy, the evolution of political forces and modes of socialization. I argue that bonded labour results from a specific regime of accumulation characterized by cheap labour, increased domestic demand sustained through household debt, as well as modes of conflict, contestation and worker identity formation that engage with both governmental programmes and consumerism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with capitalist agricultural development in West Bengal, India. Based on a field study of two regions at different ends of the development spectrum, it shows the class-specific nature of agrarian development. Farms based on hired labour adopt more capital-intensive techniques, operate on a much larger scale and have higher yields in comparison to farms based on family labour, regardless of their size. Differentiation of the peasantry is intense where the adoption of capital-intensive technology is high. The paper concludes that the arguments of A.V. Chayanov and A.K. Sen, which seek to explain the inverse relation between farm size and productivity in terms of the superior efficiency of farms based on family labour compared to capitalist farms, are not borne out by our findings. Moreover, in the advanced region of Bardhaman, farmers of all economic classes are found to be subject to a form of compulsive exchange or stressed commerce brought about by traders external to the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes a preliminary analysis of the process of agrarian capitalist transition in Arunachal Pradesh, one of the least studied regions of India. Primarily based on information collected through a field survey in eleven villages, the paper seeks to explain the nature and implications of institutional unevenness in the development of capitalism. Institutional diversity is not simply mapped across space, it is also manifested in the simultaneous existence of market and non-market institutions across the means of production within the same village or spatial context. In addition, there is a continuous and complex interaction among these institutions which both shapes and is shaped by this capitalist transition. Primitive accumulation emerges as a continuing characteristic of the on-going agrarian and non-agrarian capitalist transition. Institutional adaptation, continuity and hybridity are as integral to the emergence of the market economy as are the processes of creation of new institutions and demise of others. There is no necessary correspondence between the emerging commercialization of the different productive dimensions of the agrarian economy. These uneven processes are deeply influenced by existing and emerging power relations and by the state. Framed by the Bernstein–Byres debate about the contemporary (ir)relevance of the agrarian question, evidence is presented to justify the conclusion that although the processes at work are far from the classical models of the transition to capitalism, all aspects of the agrarian question remain relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with two issues that are important areas of concern in the recent literature on water management in less-developed countries: forms of ownership of groundwater resources and alternatives to anarchy in the exploitation and use of groundwater. The emergence of a market for irrigation water has been argued to have the potential to provide irrigation water to large numbers of small cultivators in developing countries. The development of free markets for water, however, has also been shown to be associated with the emergence of 'water-lords' and with contracts for the purchase and sale of water that are biased against the poor. By contrast, this paper presents two examples of viable non-market interventions in water-sharing - regulation of water markets by village councils and cooperative tubewell groups - from villages in West Bengal, India. These interventions both improved the efficiency of water-use and represented relatively equitable arrangements for water-sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revolutionary Left movements in India base their programme of radical social transformation on an understanding of Indian society that borrows heavily from the 1930s formulation of the Chinese Communist Party ( CPC). The characterization of Indian society as semi-feudal and semi-colonial, and the elevation of the contradiction between feudalism and the broad masses as the primary (and basic) contradiction, seem to have been influenced by the programme of the CPC. This formulation may have had validity in the late 1960s, but transformations of the structure of the Indian economy since then seem to have made it less applicable at present. Drawing on recent research on Indian political economy, this paper (a) summarizes some of the key features of political-economic changes that have taken place in India over the past four decades, and (b) draws out some implications of these changes for the programmatic debate within the Indian communist movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of 'financial inclusion' has become a central trope that legitimates a wide range of contemporary development practices. By constructing a new object of development - the 'financially excluded' - it facilitates the expansion of an increasingly corporatized microfinance technocracy. The present paper problematizes the underlying binaries of inclusion/exclusion and formal/informal finance upon which this narrative is based. Through an examination of the 2010 Andhra Pradesh microfinance crisis, it demonstrates key contradictions within the discourse and practices of commercial microfinance. In so doing, it demonstrates why the narrative of financial inclusion and its correlate notion of 'consumption smoothing' are inadequate tools with which to conceptualize the political economy of contemporary agrarian change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the literature on 'transnational agrarian movements' by drawing upon the 'fishworkers' movement' in the 1960s in India's Kerala state, and the subsequent role it played in the formation of national and transnational networks. Against the prevailing teleology of movement network organization from local to national to transnational, I suggest that transnational and transregional flows produce the local and national as spaces of action. Instead of an unproblematic inclusion of fishers' movements into the general rubric of 'transnational agrarian movements', I argue that considering differences between agriculture and fishing, and within fishing, allows a better explanation of the potential and limits of solidarity within the transnational network of fishers' movements. I show that transnationality is not only about solidarity between movements but also about engaging with 'transnational regimes', which provide resources for network formation as well as produce stresses within networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to reconstruct David Harvey's theory of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) through an ethnography of a Special Economic Zone in Rajasthan, India. While Harvey sees ABD as an economic process of over-accumulated capital finding new outlets, I argue that it is an extra-economic process of coercive expropriation typically exercised by states to help capitalist overcome barriers to accumulation - in this case, the absence of fully capitalist rural land markets. In India's privately developed SEZs, the accumulation generated by this dispossession - which represents the disaccumulation of the peasantry - occurs through capitalist rentiers who develop rural land for mainly IT companies and luxury real estate, and profit from the appreciation of artificially cheap land acquired by the state. While such development has only minimally and precariously absorbed the labour of dispossessed farmers, it has generated a peculiar agrarian transformation through land speculation that has enlisted fractions of the rural elite into a chain of rentiership, drastically amplified existing class and caste inequalities, undermined food security and, surprisingly, fuelled non-productive economic activity and pre-capitalist forms of exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within neoliberal development discourse, the poor are represented as entrepreneurial subjects for whom integration into formalized financial systems can facilitate their escape from poverty. This paper examines how the 2010 microfinance crisis in Andhra Pradesh reveals significant fault lines that underlie this narrative. It argues that the crisis of microfinance in Andhra Pradesh needs to be placed within the context of severe agrarian dislocations stemming from the impact of trade liberalization, drought cycles and a transformation of rural social relations. The contradictions are most strikingly represented in increasing rural differentiation and a generalized crisis of social reproduction among land-poor farmers and landless labourers. A massive influx of microfinance - driven by both state-operated programmes and private-sector institutions leveraged with cross-border financial flows - found a ready clientele among various agrarian classes seeking to bolster consumption and roll over debt in conditions of significant uncertainty and distress. Yet in banking on this vulnerability, microfinance institutions socialized the contradictions of rural Andhra Pradesh and have ultimately been thrown into limbo through the unleashing of political and social forces unforeseen in neoliberal narratives of agrarian change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to catalogue and analyse the changes over two decades in the world of agricultural labourers in a backward region in India. It is primarily based on a series of field visits to two villages in Purnia district, located in the north-eastern part of Bihar. Changes in the living conditions of labourers are obviously connected to developments in the rural economy of the region and there are important linkages with developments elsewhere, including changes in the overall macro-economic policy regime. An attempt is made to trace these. Agricultural wage workers in the surveyed region are extremely poor by any reckoning, although a few of them have made some progress through state-sponsored programmes and migration. These developments have also contributed significantly to altering the relations of dominance and subordination, thus creating greater elbow-room for labourers. However, it is important not to overstate these small gains and there are serious doubts as to whether they can be sustained. It appears that some of the material correlates of labourers’ well-being in the surveyed region are being affected adversely by the currently ascendant neoliberal policy regime. There are no signs of the emergence of mechanisms that might imply sustained significant improvements in the very fragile life and work conditions of these labourers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of women's land rights has a relatively young history in India. This paper briefly traces that history before examining why gendering the land question remains critical, and what the new possibilities are for enhancing women's land access. Potentially, women can obtain land through the State, the family and the market. The paper explores the prospects and constraints linked to each, arguing that access through the family and the market deserve particular attention, since most arable land in India is privatized. On market access, the paper makes several departures from existing discussions by focusing on the advantages, especially for poor women, of working in groups to lease in or purchase land; using government credit for land rather than merely for micro–enterprises; and collectively managing purchased or leased in land, the collectivity being constituted with other women, rather than with family members. Such group functioning is shown to have several advantages over individual or family–based farming. This approach could also help revive land reform, community cooperation and joint farming in a radically new form, one centred on poor women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a broad strategic assessment of the experience of rural industrialization in India. It does so from a policy perspective with the aim eventually of highlighting specific outstanding policy issues. Rural and small-scale industrialization (RSSI) has held a special place in Indian development thinking and policy formulation from the outset. This privileged position, however, does not derive from a universal consensus with regard to the rationale and policy framework applicable to this sub-sector. However, such has been the symbolic power and populist appeal of RSSI that it has retained its special status within diverse strategic and ideological frameworks. But how has the sub-sector performed? Is the infant industry still in need of paternalistic protection at the age of fifty? Are there any credible indications of a strategic break with longstanding policy frameworks inherited from the past? Can any crucial policy gaps be identified? How well does rural small-scale industry satisfy the extensive developmental claims made by its proponents? These are the general questions addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article announces that Subir Sinha has received the Bernstein & Byres Prize from the periodical "Journal of Agrarian Change (JAC)" and discusses reports within the issue on the transnationality of fisheries in Kerala, India.

In the 1980s and 1990s, during the high‐water mark of Washington Consensus development, rural sociologists and geographers critical of contract farming described contract as a legal fiction—one that imagines formally equal and voluntary relations between large firms and small farmers and hence that functions purposefully to obscure unequal social relations. Today, however, development planners, who argue for contract farming as an integral part of value chain agriculture, describe unequal bargaining power as a problem for rural development to solve. Our article analyzes how proponents have domesticated what was once a radical critique of contract farming—a phenomenon that we suggest tells of value chain development more broadly. Via a qualitative case study of India, we describe how a range of actors—development planners, state officials, and farmers—now all make arguments about unequal bargaining power and yet hold disparate understandings of what bargaining inequalities mean and what reforms should therefore follow. More specifically, we show how and why common reform proposals—for contract regulation and farmer aggregation—remain constrained by the inequalities they would challenge and thus why farmers themselves speak different possibilities to the problem of unequal bargaining power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of Farmers' Rights in international law is closely related to the "seed wars" at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) during the 1980s. Recognizing the plant innovations of farmers everywhere, these rights represented a countervailing measure against increasing pressures to protect commercial plant breeders' rights around the world. Nearly three decades later, the intellectual property rights of plant breeders, internationally recognized and legally binding, are stronger than ever, while Farmers' Rights are facing increasing threats from the continuing spread of industrial agriculture and biotechnologies. The present article seeks to make two contributions: first, embedding the emergence of Farmers' Rights in a historical analysis, it conceptualizes them not simply as a new category of rights, but as a specific manifestation of the conflictual entwinement of capitalism and plant genetic resources fomented in the geopolitical context of the 20th century. Second, focusing on India and Brazil, it analyses the different manner in which the state in both has played a crucial role in restricting the real freedoms of traditional farmers. While farmers' "interests" are routinely preyed upon to justify various policies, their overall effect promises to deepen the ongoing process of farmers' dispossession and separation from their basic means of production: the seed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of land, its commodification and role in capital accumulation has come to occupy centre stage in political economy since the last decade of the 20th century. Such concerns are however not confined to the agrarian question as in classical political economy but have emerged primarily in the wake of land being integrated into circuits of speculative capital accumulation constituting novel processes of dispossession. This financialization of land and accompanying processes of dispossession, often justified through neoliberal developmentalism, not only has consequences for agrarian actors and ecologies but also poses questions about the role of land in current accumulation dynamic, especially in transitioning economies in the global South. Based on a review of three recently published books on the contemporary land question and politics around it in India, this essay explores how such incorporations and dispossessions are driven by multiple developmental imperatives and asks what such logics mean for conceptualizing the land question in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks how local traders or middlemen continue to thrive in the agricultural markets of liberalized India. It studies this by focusing on the shifting politics of the relation between farmers and commission agents (arhtias) in post‐harvest wholesale markets in Ludhiana district, Punjab. It uses the framework of political analysis of markets towards this, paying close attention to the role of the state and the nature of interlinked markets. Drawing on intensive primary fieldwork, the article argues that the power of the arhtias is constituted differently across different commodities and in relation to different agrarian classes. At the same time, the state, notwithstanding its changing priorities, and the diversification of large farmers into the commission agent business have been crucial to their persistence in the wholesale grain markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution explores how new regions and crops are integrated in the contemporary food regime through a fieldwork‐based approach to maize cultivation in rural Karnataka, South India. As an intrinsic part of the industrial grain–oilseed–livestock complex, maize is an important component of the contemporary food regime. I argue that the expansion of maize at the village level follows commodity frontier dynamics, located at the conjuncture of processes "from above" pushing the industrial grain–oilseed–complex forward and processes "from below" that integrate maize in everyday livelihoods. Focusing on how villagers make use of maize in ways that cross, but simultaneously are differentiated along, lines of class and caste, this article seeks to contribute to our understanding of the everyday dynamics of contemporary food regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crop seeds are a factor of production that can be produced on farm or bought, commodified in varying ways and degrees, and that can change slowly or rapidly—all of which directly impact the crucial process of farmer "skilling." Seed choices also offer a unique empirical window through which farmer knowledge may be studied. Although other studies have examined the differences between cash and food crops, this research provides new insights into varyingly commodified crops within the same agrarian system. When planting rice, genetically modified hybrid cotton seeds, and garden vegetables, farmers in Telangana, India, face different constraints and opportunities to learn about their seeds and practice that knowledge in the field. These differences arise from agronomic properties of the seeds themselves as well as from the sociocultural meaning that structures the context in which farmers buy, grow, and save them. This measurable discrepancy in farmer knowledge and experience presents an opportunity to examine the variable impact of seed commodification as it is experienced by the same group of farmers across several different crops. Building on theories of commodification and agricultural knowledge, we propose that the different ways in which farmer knowledge operates in these crops reflect a spectrum on which knowledge and commodification are inversely related. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural markets are a prime object of what the anthropologist Clifford Geertz called 'theoretical diffusion' (Geertz 1973). In this diffused context, Henry Bernstein used an approach developed by French scholars, 'filières vivrieres', to analyse the ethnicized concentration of capital in South African maize markets (Bernstein 1996). The first part of this essay critically introduces the background to this approach, and Bernstein's development of it, to examine capital accumulation and public and private regulation. The second part merges insights from filières with a systems approach to post-harvest activity. It revisits four decades of research on South Indian agriculture and its paddy-rice markets to show how petty production and trade can coexist with capitalist accumulation, showing how, to what extent and why the relations of agricultural commodity marketing 'fail to complete' the process of polar class differentiation and consolidate petty commodity production in the post-harvest sphere of circulation - the filière - as well as in production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature on sustainability of agriculture, both labourers and workers are conspicuously absent. Here, the sustainability of agriculture has been defined in terms of whether the farm household in question is able to yield an energy surplus when its members and the animals in its possession are obtaining an adequate 'energy income' or Calorie intake. To evaluate the sustainability of 590 farming households in the state of West Bengal, India, during 2004-5, four progressively stricter definitions of sustainability have been proposed, defined and applied. The method of energy balance analysis was followed. A negative surplus was found to be near-universal across size-groups in terms of the net area sown (NAS), the gross cultivated area (GCA) and agro-climatic zones. The threshold output for a non-negative surplus during the cultivating period was 700,000 megajoules (MJ); in terms of the GCA for a positive 'full and final' annual surplus, it was 3 hectares, and in NAS terms it was 2.5 hectares; against NAS per household size, it was 0.6 hectares, for ensuring a positive surplus beyond the annual sustainability. No evidence could be found in favour of household size as an explanation for the negative surplus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's agricultural sector is at a crossroads, facing challenges of stagnation in crop yields, non-remunerative prices, falling crop incomes and tardy responses from public service systems. There are reports of peasant suicides due to non-profitability of farming. However, scant empirical evidence is available on changes in real income and wages in the Indian agricultural sector. The present study uses data from the National Accounts Statistics and Cost of Cultivation Surveys to analyse the changes in real income and discusses the underlying reasons. The study reveals that the purchasing power of farmers has remained low and has worsened over recent years. The value of crop output has increased, but a disproportionate rise in input costs has resulted in a fall in crop incomes in several states, with the agriculturally developed Punjab being an exception. Interestingly, real wage rates for agricultural labour have shown an increasing trend, indicating improvement in the welfare of labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that Marcus Taylor has received the Bernstein & Byres Prize from the "Journal of Agrarian Change." (JAC). It states that the winning article of Taylor tackles the case of rural suicides in Andhra Pradesh (AP), India. Moreover, a judge says that Taylor provides a power political economic analysis on the contingencies and interrelationships of contemporary capitalist process.

The interest rates of microfinance institutions ( MFIs) are widely criticized, although they are lower than those of many short-term lenders in 'developed' countries. The criticisms are not usually related to the returns on micro-investments. Little data is available, but earnings from farming seem generally to be below or little above the interest charged for microcredit. Returns from petty trade, a more frequent use of such credit, are well over the price that micro-borrowers pay for their loans. Microfinance is not a replacement for subsidized farm credit; farming is subsidized, everywhere, and efforts should be made to improve and revive the provision of low-cost agricultural finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ILO is presently attempting to spearhead a ‘global alliance against forced labour’. This article surveys the ILO approach to forced labour, recent theoretical debates regarding forced labour and recent empirical work on bonded labour in India. It argues that the ILO ‘ghettoizes’ forced labour, and that existing theories do not provide an alternative to this, as they focus on high-level ahistorical models. There is a need to develop specific analyses of the processes underlying both free and unfree labour relations in the present context, and their relation to neo-liberal globalization as well as country-specific conditions. The review of Indian case studies and of aspects of neo-liberal globalization points towards such an analytical approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a primary field survey and secondary sources of information, this study analyzes the West Bengal experience of participatory rural transformation in relation to the changing class structure in a differentiated rural economy, the rise in class-consciousness among the rural poor and the participation of different classes in the political process of decision-making. Utsa Patnaik's (1987 ) labour exploitation criterion is used in order to rank rural households in class terms, alongside the standard acreage groupings. This study strongly refutes the neo-liberal (World Bank) idea of social capital and civil society as sources of ‘people's participation’. It is argued that ‘people's participation’ is a meaningless concept, since the ‘people’ as a category includes different classes with conflicting interests. Though subordinate classes in West Bengal have achieved a higher level of class consciousness than in the past, and have resisted extra economic coercion, and while their political participation has risen, their involvement at the grass roots level of administrative decision-making is very weak. Panchayat Raj has so far failed to initiate a second phase of institutional reform in West Bengal, encompassing education, gender justice and above all the co-operative movement. This partial failure is the outcome of short-term electoral benefit being given priority over and so undermining class struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]