Altering Punjab's caste equations

The Punjab experience suggests rising agricultural productivity doesn't automatically translate into better jobs,but the story doesn't end there.

A recent paper on the post-Green revolution economic transition of Punjab’s peasantry, published by Punjab Agricultural University professors Sukhpal Singh and Shruti Bhogal, suggests that increasing productivity of rural workers is only one part of the agriculture to manufacturing transition.

 

Punjab has the most mechanized agricultural sector in the country, and the numbers reflect this. In 1983-84, the sector provided 479 million-man days of work a year; in 2009-10, the number dropped 16 percent to 401 million man-days. The wheat crop is almost entirely mechanized, and it is only the rice crop that still provides seasonal employment.

 

In Punjab, rising input costs have made small landholdings unviable so the share of cultivators in the total rural workforce has fallen from 46.11 percent in 1981 to 29.78 in 2011, while the share of agricultural labour – who worked on these fields – has reduced from 31.82 percent to 23.85 percent.

 

“Other rural workers”, who comprised of 63 percent of the rural work force by 2001, have made up this shortfall.This category includes workers in mining and quarrying, manufacturing, transport and construction – suggesting a pattern of “depeasantisation”, where small farmers and peasants are taking up casual labour in the informal sector.

 

But the shift away from farm to non-farm work has in some instances, altered village-level caste dynamics.

 

Last month, I travelled to Punjab to write about the Ekta Club – a group of young Dalit women fighting for the right to till village land reserved for scheduled caste communities.

 

Such lands are leased out each year to the highest bidder, but the Ekta Club’s contention – and my reporting – suggested that dominant caste Jats usually appropriate the resource by putting forward a compliant Dalit and bidding by proxy.

 

This week, Sandeep Kaur, the Ekta Club’s leader, told me the land had eventually been leased to a Dalit woman fronting for an influential Jat village official, but vowed to continue fighting.

 

In the past, she said, Jats exerted complete control of the village’s agrarian economy, allowing them to enforce “economic boycotts” in which Dalits were simply not allowed to work on Jat fields and pushed into destitution. Over the last 20 years however, the shift away from agriculture has altered the dynamics of power in the village by blunting the boycott’s sharp edge.

 

Singh and Bhogal’s data also shows that people aren’t necessarily transitioning to better work. A survey of 150 farm households in Punjab suggested a third of those who left farming worked as casual labour – particularly in construction, a fifth were unemployed, and only 5 percent took up jobs in the private sector.

 

Once more Sandeep’s experience is illustrative: both her elder brothers work as construction labour and petty contractors in the nearby town of Malerkotla.

 

Sandeep however, is trying to set up her own businesses – a beauty parlour and a boutique for tailored salwar-kameez – even as she pursues a degree in accounts. With 10 million young people like her joining the Indian workforce every year,she knows even the construction sector cannot absorb them all.