After a long period of virtual stasis, the movement of labour away from agriculture - a process coterminous with economic development - has gathered momentum in recent decades, according to the 2011 census. Although this much-delayed shift to non-agricultural activities began since 1991, the share of workers living off the land still remains substantial at 54.6 per cent. India, thus, remains very much an agrarian economy although its share in the gross domestic product (GDP) has declined to 14 per cent. The fact that the share of cultivators and agricultural labour in the workforce has declined less than the sector's share in GDP entails a decline in income per head over time and persisting poverty.
The decennial census is a massive exercise involving a headcount of 1.2 billion people. The sheer scale and complexity of this undertaking does not lend itself to detailed probing questions that are possible, say, in the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO's) five-yearly surveys. Even so, the numbers are robust enough to highlight major structural transformations in the economy. The result that has attracted the most attention is that the farmer population has shrunk by nine million between 2001 and 2011 (see Rukmini Shrinivasan's article in The Times of India). Although the share of cultivators in the workforce has been steadily falling, this is the first time the number has fallen in absolute terms, if one ignores the earlier fall in 1971 as arising from a more restrictive definition of the workforce in the 1971 census.
While the farmer population is thinning out of late, there has been a steady rise in the number of agricultural labourers who outnumber cultivators in 2011. The proximate causes for these trends require deeper research. During the last decade, they plausibly reflect the fact that agricultural growth has been sluggish although overall GDP growth has been robust at 7.5 per cent per annum. The growth of employment in agriculture has been slow and declining and contrasts with better prospects in non-agriculture.* Owing to the pressure of population, the average size of land holdings is getting more fragmented over time. Farming at the margin, thus, is getting more unviable, forcing small cultivators to join the growing ranks of agricultural labourers or seek non-agricultural employment.
Cultivators and agricultural labour account for over half of the 481.7 million workers in the country. According to the fourfold classification of the primary census abstract, other workers or those engaged in non-agricultural activities account for 42 per cent, with the remainder in household industry. The workforce number includes main workers who worked for more than six months in a year, and marginal workers who worked for less than six months. The 2011 census further differentiates those who worked less than three months and those who worked for three to six months. The decline of nine million among farmers is largely from those who tilled their fields for more than six months; those whose main work is cultivation. Some of them have taken to agricultural labour. But most have become other workers.
The 2011 census also highlights (what the NSSO's surveys have been indicating) the growing marginalisation of the workforce. The share of marginal workers in the workforce has grown from 22.2 per cent in 2001 to 24.8 per cent in 2011. In other words, one in four workers in the Indian economy has worked for less than six months in a year. In the earlier 1991 census, this share was much less at nine per cent. Around one-fifth of cultivators are marginal workers in 2011 as against 11 per cent in 1991. Among agriculture labour, their relative importance is as high as 40 per cent, up from 13 per cent in 1991. The proportion of marginal workers has also grown among other workers to 16 per cent in 2011.
One in five farmers working for less than six months reflect the crisis conditions in the agrarian sector, forcing them to seek work elsewhere. The same applies to agricultural labour where the proportion of marginal workers is much higher. According to T S Papola, visiting professor at the Institute for Studies in Industrial Development, "Agriculture is increasingly unable to productively employ the growing rural labour force. At the same time, there has been some growth of non-agricultural activities in rural areas in construction, trade, and services which have generally offered better earnings. Most of these employment opportunities have been of a temporary and casual nature."**
Participating in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme is also of a marginal nature. The growing marginalisation of other workers possibly reflects the fact that regular jobs have hardly increased or have declined owing to redundancies caused by technological and competitive compulsions, especially in larger enterprises. So a part of the regular workforce has been rendered marginal and most new jobs are of a marginal category, he adds. These propositions can be looked into more closely when detailed tabulations become available. But the big story so far is that the shift of workers from agricultural to non-agricultural activities as expected in the process of development has begun.
*T S Papola, Partha Pratim Sahu "Growth and Structure of Employment: Long-term and Post-Reform Performance and Emerging Challenge", ISID occasional paper series, Institute for Studies in Industrial Development, New Delhi
**Kaushik Basu, Annemie Maertens edited "The Concise Oxford Companion to Economics in India", page 426
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