Peasantry as a social group is historically resilient: V.K. Ramachandran

V.K. Ramachandran discusses the resilience and importance of peasantry in India's rural economy, debunking rumors of its demise.

The rumours of the death of peasantry as a social group is much exaggeration; it still exists and plays an important role in production as a whole, said V.K. Ramachandran, vice- Chairperson, Kerala State Planning Commission in a lecture titled ‘Peasants and rural wage workers in contemporary India’ organised as part of The M.S. Swaminathan Centenary Lecture Series, here at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai, on Monday.

Delivering a lecture on classes in India’s countryside and on the two major components of India, India’s rural working class: peasantry and wage workers, Prof. Ramachandran said that the peasantry as a social group was enormously historically resilient and was a category that spans over many different kinds of social formations – under slavery, feudalism and capitalism. “So as the social formations changed, so did the character of the peasantry,” he said.

Prof. Ramachandran referred to a series of surveys taken from the early part of the century by Foundation of Agrarian Studies and particularly referring to those resurveyed from 2018 – two villages in U.P – village in Bijnor districts in western U.P., eastern U.P. village dominated by Dalits, two villages in Bihar – in west Champaran and Samastipur in Bihar, and two villages in the lower Cauvery delta.

He further said that the number of women agricultural workers rose from 101 million in 2011-12 to 153 million in 2023-24. “The number of male workers over the same period rose from 233 to 258 million. In total, there were 411 million rural workers in India. So we asked the question: who are they!?” he said.

He said that while the agricultural household’s net income of a petty producer, even in the places where the agricultural incomes were growing like in U.P. sugar cane villages, it was less than 40% of the income of the agricultural family, while in Tamil Nadu’s villages, it was even less.

However, the picture changed completely when the gross value of agricultural output, including animal husbandry, was considered, he said.

“It was 50-60%..it suddenly rose. It would vary across different villages and different types of agriculture in India. But the share in gross value of the output of this section of the population (petty producers) is still very high. It was high in U.P. villages and low in lower Cauvery villages. So, after much searching through the data, we actually did come to the conclusion that the rumours of the death of the peasantry as a social group is much exaggeration. It still exists and plays an important role in production as a whole,” he said.