Revisiting Senapur: Reflections on Agrarian Changes in North India

Abstract

Through a revisit study in 2013, this article attempts to explore agrarian relations in Senapur, a village located in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Research reveals that landlessness remains concentrated amongst dalits as does the continuing hold of ‘upper castes’ on land. When inheritance acts as the primary mode of transfer of landed property in the absence of market-mediated and state-mediated transactions, two results are evident: a decrease in the size of holdings due to the subdivision of property and simultaneously the land remains with the original group of land owners resulting in continuing group inequalities. Given this skewed landownership pattern, one-fifth of the total input cost in cultivation by the landless class is usurped by the landed class in the form of land rent. Another interesting feature of agrarian relations that is observed is the occasional rise in cash agricultural wages which accompany falling incomes from agricultural labour wages. The study also reveals that the ‘eradication of the small farmers’ is not a perceptible phenomenon in Senapur with farming families augmenting their income from other sources to keep their small farms going. The biggest change appears in the composition of the labour force marked by a massive movement from agriculture to construction in the last one decade.

Keywords

Revisit study Senapur dalits upper caste landownership labour force

Introduction

Often referred to as the ‘mode of production debate’, this body of work primarily focuses on the development of capitalist relations in agriculture (Bernstein & Byres, 2001; Patnaik, 2007). The mode of production debate has received attention from various scholars throughout the 1960s and 1970s. By the eighties, a consensus emerged among scholars that capitalist relations were on their way to becoming widespread in agriculture. But the onset of a new kind of economic regime in India since 1991, in the form of state policies leading to economic liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation, has triggered another debate in agrarian studies. It has been observed that the penetration of capitalist relations has slowed down due to the ensuing agrarian crisis (Patnaik, 2007). Another strand in this discourse goes beyond appraising the penetration of capitalist relations in agriculture. Moyo, Jha and Yeros (2015) believe that, ‘the agrarian question continues to evolve and in contemporary times it is a question of wresting global agriculture, land and other natural resources from the predatory logic of monopoly-ﬁnance capital’.

The recent debate in agrarian studies touches upon the issue of the survival of small farms in the context of the capital-intensive nature of agriculture. Ramanamurthy and Chandra (2016) have tried to understand the persistence of small farms that were ‘doomed to die’ with the development of capitalist relations. Others are not surprised to see that small farms have survived and argue that this transition can take an extended period (Basole, 2016). The debate on the nature and character of non-cultivating peasant households (NCPH) also throws up interesting questions that need to be probed further. One strand of this debate argues that a section of the NCPHs, ‘which is too busy to farm’, is gaining strength because of the diversification of their economic activities whereas the other strand points to the phenomenon of the withdrawal of marginal farmers because they are ‘too poor to farm’. This discussion reopens the debate on the changing forms and extent of tenancy. If one position claims an increase in the extent of tenancy due to the NCPHs leasing out land, the second position cites data to show that the extent of tenancy is going down due to a drop in demand for land from marginal farmers in the context of the capital-intensive nature of agriculture. The changing form of tenancy from sharecropping to fixed rent is also referred to in this debate (Reddy & Shaw, 2012; Vijay, 2012). Recent feminist scholarship and investigations from a dalit standpoint have also asked new questions. While probing emerging agrarian relations, this study also engages with these issues.

Some Methodological Issues

Revisiting studied villages after a period of time has gained prominence in Indian social science as a method of capturing change. Researchers collect data on various aspects of village life and compare it with data from previous studies, either qualitatively or quantitatively to draw insights into the dynamics of change. This tradition has become so strong that now we have villages that have been investigated several times during the last one century. The ‘Slater villages’ of Tamil Nadu are one such set of villages that were first surveyed by Gilbert Slater and his students in 1916 and then resurveyed in the 1930s, 1960s, 1980s and in 2008 by Harriss, Jeyaranjan, & Nagaraj (2010). Another remarkable revisit study by Djurfeldt et al. (2008) captures unusual patterns of exit from and entry into agriculture. Surinder Jodhka (2014) visited two villages of Haryana after a gap of two decades in 2008–2009. Like Harriss, this study also notes the manifestation of growing diversification of employment into households becoming increasingly ‘pluri-active’.

A continuous stream of studies on Palanpur village took place from the 1950s to 2009–2010. This village located in the Moradabad district of Uttar Pradesh has been investigated six times in as many decades. The most recent study notes, ‘continuity regarding the three primary drivers of change—population, technology and outside jobs’ (Himanshu, Lanjouw, Murgai & Stern, 2016). Srivastava (2016) studied a village pseudonym Belapur on the border of Pratapgarh and Jaunpur in 2012. This revisit village study appears to be more relevant for this article as it too is located in eastern Uttar Pradesh.

Drawing inspiration from the tradition of agrarian change this study explores agrarian relations but due to the limitation of required data falls short of fully appreciating changes. Nonetheless, it indicates certain changes and raises questions to be probed further. It tries to overcome some of its pitfalls, at least partially, by looking at multidimensional household data from an intersectional point of view. It is assumed that primary data, desegregated by caste and class, will give insights into the dynamics of the change experienced by agrarian relations. In political economy literature, ‘class’ signifies the relationship between the producer of surplus value and those who appropriate this surplus (Patnaik, 1972). Taking landownership categories as a proxy for ‘class’ will be confusing because just a change in the quantum of land does not necessarily lead to a change in relationships. Besides as ‘capital-intensification on land takes place, the cultivated area becomes less and less adequate as a proxy for the scale of operation’ (Patnaik, 1972). But in village Senapur, most of the land is irrigated from various sources. In this situation, taking land ownership as a proxy indicator is not misleading.

Social groups are often taken as ‘caste’. The same practice is replicated here also. But with increasing heterogeneity within social groups and also within particular castes, it is difficult to club several castes into a single category especially while studying development issues. Because of a long-shared history, a grouping of castes into Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) is relevant in the study of inter-group relations generated by a social structure such as power relations between dalits and others. But within the category, SC, each community has transformed itself differently. Other Backward Castes (OBCs) remain the most heterogeneous group. The study of ‘change’ necessarily implies looking at a phenomenon from at least at two different points. Alternatively, primary data collected at one point in time has been collated with qualitative data giving insights into the direction of change.

Selection of Village and Household Survey

For getting a clearer grasp on the dynamics of change, Senapur village was selected for a longitudinal study—considering that it was examined earlier also. This selection enabled the research team to qualitatively compare findings of previous studies with findings of the present study. Located in Jaunpur district of eastern Uttar Pradesh, numerous studies have been conducted so far on Senapur that provide substantive background information. To get a comparative picture of different classes, castes and gender, all households of Senapur, except two habitations, were surveyed. This exercise was also helpful in gaining an insight into the dynamic of changing interrelationships between different segments of village society. Earlier, studies on this village mainly focused on the interrelationship between two numerically dominant groups, dalits and Thakurs, who also constituted a larger part of the agrarian formation. Considering this, two tolas—of other castes have not been included in this survey. The present study also focuses on the relationship between the two groups mentioned above. A total of 471 households of Senapur were surveyed in the summer months of 2013 to collect data on different aspects of their economic, social and political life.

The Village Senapur

This village came into the academic limelight in the 1950s when the famous historian-anthropologist, Bernard S. Cohn, started studying it. His work was later carried forward by Morris Opler, Rudra Dutt Singh and other scholars. These studies portray this village as a typical north Indian village dominated by so-called upper caste landlords and dalit tenants with wage labourers positioned at the bottom of the village hierarchy. The peasant and service castes form the middle rung of this social, economic and political organisation. In his major study of this village, Cohn (1958) notes that in 1948, ‘out of 1,852 people enumerated in a census conducted by the village accountant there were 630 dalits,¹ 436 Thakurs, 239 Noniyas, 116 Ahirs and 67 Lohars in village Senapur. Besides, 18 other castes had a population of less than 50’. This study further notes that dalits, ‘derived the principal part of their livelihood through farming small plots of land as tenants and hiring themselves out as agricultural workers to work on the land of Thakur landlords’ (Cohn, 1958).

Agrarian changes mainly triggered by state initiatives on land legislation were considered another important process of transformation by these studies. They document the weakening of the long-standing patron–client relationship with the introduction of tenancy laws in 1859 and its breakdown after the abolition of landlordism soon after Independence (Singh, 1956). After the 1950s and early 1960s, the state witnessed several upheavals that left the village completely altered. This began with the assertion of OBCs who benefitted from the first phase of land reforms. They started articulating their politics; challenging the dominance of so-called upper castes. This was followed by a dalit movement from the 1980s onwards that dealt a severe blow to the dominance of the upper caste in the state’s politics. These changes in politics coincided with changes in the agrarian structure especially the land ownership pattern, the emergence of a middle class among marginalised communities, migration to non-agriculture occupations and so on (Srivastava, 2007).

Agrarian Changes in Senapur

From a political economy perspective, land relations are taken as the basis of agrarian relations. The changing composition of the labour force in agriculture and the proportion of produce for self-consumption and the market are also taken as another indicator to assess the nature of these relations. The composition of expenditure on inputs, cropping pattern, technological inputs and channels of sale also give an idea of changing agrarian relations (Patnaik, 1972, 2007; Singh, 2006; Vijay, 2012). To explore aspects of agrarian relations mentioned earlier, data on the pattern of land ownership, land leasing, land use pattern, quality of land regarding irrigation facilities, input and output of agricultural operation, disposal of produce, mechanism of agricultural marketing and so on have been collected from households of Senapur.

Land

Land Ownership

One can see that Table 1 reveals stark inequalities between social groups and persisting landlessness even after half a century of land reforms. Almost 45 per cent of all surveyed households report owning no land. The concentration of landlessness among dalits is also evident from this data. Of these landless households, three-fourths belong to the SC category; and two-thirds of SC households are landless. Going by the state average, this magnitude of landlessness is very high. In Uttar Pradesh, poor communities generally own tiny pieces of land but absolute landlessness is not very high. Apart from these landless households, more than one-fourth dalit households own less than one acre of land. There is only one large farmer and ten medium farmers, all of them Thakurs, belonging to the general category. The extent of landlessness is also very low among Thakurs. Historically, they have been landlords of this village controlling the entire land. The majority households in this group own between one to five acres of land.

The studies carried out by Opler (1956), Singh (1956) and Cohn (1959) reported that, historically, Thakurs controlled the entire agricultural land of Senapur. But more than half a century later, landownership patterns do not look that different. After the abolition of the zamindari system, registered tenants might have received ownership of land in their possession, but many others could not prove their claim. The average size of landholding appears to have gone down drastically during this period due to a sub-division of property, but a larger share of land is still controlled by the original group. Srivastava (2016) also notes a similar pattern in Belapur where around three-fourths of the cultivable land is still owned by its original group of owners, in this case, Brahmins. But he also notes that Brahmins are slowly selling their land to cash-rich OBCs. However, in the Slater villages (Harriss, Jeyaranjan, & Nagaraj, 2010), ‘penetration of capitalist relations of production at the expense of landlordism in its classical sense of appropriating surplus from tenant cultivators’, has been observed but the landlord in this studied village remained ‘powerful till date even after the demise of landlordism that persisted longer here than elsewhere’. Further, Jodhka (2014) also notes that land ownership and cultivation continued to be the prerogative of the dominant and upper caste in the Haryana villages studied by him.

Table 1.

Distribution of Households by Social Groups and by Land Holding (Acres)

		Absolute Land Less	Marginal-1 (0.1–0.5)	Marinal-2 (0.6–1.0)	Marginal-3 (1.0–2.5)	Small (2.5–5.0)	Medium (5.0–10.0)	Large (10 and above)	Total
General	No:	15	25	8	52	17	10	1	128
	% within social group	11.7%	19.5%	6.2%	40.6%	13.3%	7.8%	0.8%	100.0%
	% within land category	7.3%	22.5%	27.6%	64.2%	89.5%	100.0%	100.0%	28.0%
OBC	No:	37	31	11	17	1	0	0	97
	% within social group	38.1%	32.0%	11.3%	17.5%	1.0%	0.0%	0.0%	100.0%
	% within land category	18.0%	27.9%	37.9%	21.0%	5.3%	0.0%	0.0%	21.2%
SC	No:	152	55	10	12	1	0	0	230
	% within social group	66.1%	23.9%	4.3%	5.2%	0.4%	0.0%	0.0%	100.0%
	% within land category	73.8%	49.5%	34.5%	14.8%	5.3%	0.0%	0.0%	50.3%
ST	No:	2	0	0	0	0	0	0	2
	% within social group	100.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	100.0%
	% within land category	1.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.4%
Total	No:	206	111	29	81	19	10	1	457
	% within social group	45.1%	24.3%	6.3%	17.7%	4.2%	2.2%	0.2%	100.0%
	% within land category	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%	100.0%

Source: GIDS Survey on Rural Transformation, 2013, N = 457.

All these villages in different parts of India have one thing in common—the persistent concentration of land in the group of households who owned it at the time of Independence and before. This scenario indicates the sorry state of land reforms in India. But when it comes to the direct engagement of the dominant caste in cultivation, variations do exist across villages. Srivastava (2016) reports an increasing direct participation of upper caste men and women in agriculture which is not the case with Senapur. Perhaps, the possibility of upward mobility outside agriculture and required skills is one of the factors that contribute to this difference. Another factor could be the opportunity of continuous productivity enhancement.

Land Leasing

When we look at the land leasing pattern of the village (Table 2), dalits emerge as the net lessee and the general group as the net lessor. Out of the 129 general households, 28 lease-out their lands, either partially or wholly. Some of them have leased-out their entire land and migrated to white collar jobs outside the village. Given the acute landlessness, dalits remain dependent on leased-in land. Tenancy is generally seen as a result of skewed land ownership pattern. In Senapur also, dalits still lease-in land from Thakurs. Srivastava (2016) in Belapur also captures a similar pattern of upper castes being the lessees and OBC-dalits being the lessors. On an earlier occasion, Jodhka (1994) noted a decreasing tendency of small tenancy, but two decades later, newer modes of sharecropping have emerged as a substitute to attached labour for big farmers (Jodhka, 2014).

Table 2.

Land Leasing Practices

	Total
Total Households	471
General	129
OBC	103
SC	237
ST	2
No: of Households Leasing-In
General	6
OBC	5
SC	25
ST
Total	36
No: of Households Leasing-Out
General	28
OBC	3
SC	5
ST
Total	36

Source: GIDS Survey on Rural Transformation, 2013, N = 471.

However, the nature of this tenancy is altogether different from its previous incarnation. The Senapur survey did not collect data on lease contracts prevalent in this village, but qualitative observations reveal that some absentee and also some resident landowners lease-out their land as a substitute for labour and some managerial arrangements. In the qualitative data of the Belapur study (Srivastava, 2016), tenants appear to prefer cash rents, but landowners prefer sharecropping. However, in the household survey sample, there was no case of cash rent reported.

Non-cultivating Households

Out of a total 471 surveyed households, 457 responded to a question related to land ownership. Of these 251 households owned land and remaining 206 families did not. But when it comes to describing occupations, none of the members of the 55 landowning households reported agriculture as their primary or secondary occupation. This possibly implies that these families own land but do not cultivate it themselves either because of economic unviability or they have diversified into other, more attractive occupations. The composition of these non-cultivating land-owning households might give a sign in understanding agrarian changes. Out of these, 29 households own less than one acre of land and 23 own land in 1–2.5 acre-range. Two households own more than five acres of land and one between 2.5 acres and 5 acres. Of these 55 families, 22 belong to the SC category, followed by 20 in the general category and 13 in the OBC category. Considering the land ownership pattern of this village, one can safely conclude from this data that the non-cultivating households of Senapur include not only a majority of poor households but also a section of households with considerable holdings. This kind of complex composition of non-cultivating households demands a more nuanced understanding of this phenomenon than the ‘too busy to farm’ or ‘too poor to farm’ principle enunciated earlier.

Land Use Pattern

The survey data also reveal that most of the uncultivable land is occupied only by dalits. Of the 28.40 acres of such land, 27.65 acres is held by dalits. This amounts to nearly half of the total land owned by dalits. At the same time, a negligible part of land owned by households belonging to the general and OBC category is barren.

In today’s agricultural scenario, benchmarked with higher productivity, more than the quantum of land it is the quality of land that matters. The source of irrigation is taken as one of the most important indicators of the quality of land. The survey data show that households belonging to a general category possess a greater portion of good quality land with assured irrigation from the canal. Households owning such land among the OBCs and SCs are less than 10 per cent as compared to around one-third of general households. The proportion of households using rented motor pumps for irrigation is in the same range for all three social groups. Surprisingly, the percentage of households owning pump sets are comparable among general and the OBC category but much less among SCs. This scenario reveals that the source of irrigation adds another layer of disadvantages and/or privileges for different social groups according to their social location.

Labour

Composition of Labour Force

Senapur’s labour force composition witnessed a massive upheaval during the last decade. Looking at the census data (Table 3), one of the points that demands attention is that between 2001 and 2011 the proportion of cultivators to the total working population came down from 29 per cent to 23.8 per cent. Recent studies have observed a withdrawal of women from the labour force (International Labour Organization, ILO, 2013) but in this village the share of female workers as part of the total workers has gone up. During the same period, the number of women cultivators (though small in number) increased by 1.4 per cent. At a time when the proportion of labour engaged in agriculture has dropped steadily from 81.5 per cent to 57.8 per cent, the share of female workers in both the agrarian categories has gone up. This might reflect the ‘feminisation of agriculture’ which refers to a situation when in the context of agriculture becoming less profitable, men migrate to newer employment destinations leaving behind women to look after their farm. This may also be an indication of the increasing number of female-headed households (Agarwal, 1994, 2003, 2010; Rawal, 2008). Besides, a steep drop in the proportion of agricultural labour from 52 per cent to 34 per cent reflects a massive rupture in the labour force composition. Srivastava (2016) also refers to ‘dalitisation’ and ‘feminisation’ of agricultural work in his Belapur study.

Table 3.

Distribution of Per Cent Change in the Working Population of Senapur Village (Jaunpur)

Categories of Workers	Census 2001	Census 2011	% change
Total Working Population	946	1226	29.60
Male Working Population (% of Total Working Population)	615 (65%)	739 (60.3%)	–4.7
Female Working Population (% of Total Working Population)	331(35%)	487 (39.7%)	4.7
Cultivator (main and marginal) (% of Total Working Population)	275 (29%)	292 (23.8)	–5.2
Male Cultivators (% of Cultivators)	226 (82.2%)	236 (80.8%)	–1.4
Female Cultivators (main and marginal) (% of Cultivators)	49 (17.8%)	56 (19.2%)	1.4
Agricultural Labour (main and marginal) (% of Total Working Population)	497 (52.5%)	418 (34%)	–18.5
Male Agricultural Labour (main and marginal) (% of Agricultural Labour)	247 (49.7%)	204 (48.8%)	–0.9
Female Agricultural (main and marginal) (% of Agricultural Labour)	250 (50.3%)	214 (51.2%)	0.9
Workers in Household Industries (main and marginal) (% of Total Working Population)	79 (8.4%)	60 (4.9%)	–3.5
Other workers	95 (10%)	456 (37%)	27

Sources: Census of India, 2001 and 2011.

It appears that all those who have withdrawn from ‘cultivators’, ‘agricultural labour’ and ‘workers in household industries’ have joined the residual category of ‘other workers’. This turbulent decade has seen an unprecedented shift in the occupational pattern of this village with ‘other workers’ becoming the largest category. Household data collected from the village indicate that almost three-fifths of all non-agrarian workers were employed in the construction industry. After construction, apart from government schemes, no other sector was able to generate employment.

These observations on Senapur differ from the findings of Djurfeldt et al. (2008) where they note that, ‘one would expect the structural transformation of the rural economy to imply that people leave the land, which they do, but not universally and with the same tempo. Moreover, there is a stream in other direction, that is, into farming’. This again might relate to possibilities in and outside agriculture.

The household survey data reveals that landless dalits provide most of the labour for agriculture. Of all the agricultural workers, three-fourths belong to the landless category while another two fifth comes from below the one-acre category. Most of the agricultural labourers prefer to work within their village. Only around 5 per cent goes out of the village to work as agricultural labour, and of that a negligible proportion goes outside the district. On an average, they get 55 days of work as an agricultural labour a year. Several other studies have also underlined a significant reduction in the periods of sowing, harvesting and thrashing consequently declining the number of days in a year when agricultural labour is required for farming activities in the post-Green Revolution period. This reflects the continuous process of the penetration of labour displacing technology and cropping patterns. Some farm operations have been mechanised, the latest being harvesting. In eastern Uttar Pradesh, too, harvesting of major crops is done by a harvester combine. Initially, these giant machines were brought here from Punjab and the terai region of Uttar Pradesh. But now several prosperous farmers and entrepreneurs of this area have started investing in them in order to hire them out.

It is necessary to add that along with a shrinking period for which agricultural labour is required, during the peak season an acute shortage of labour is also observed. With the shortening of duration for each agricultural operation, whenever labour is required, all the farmers of a particular area would want them at the same time pushing wages to relatively higher level. The limitation of this data lies in its failure to capture fluctuation of labour wages during different agricultural seasons.

Table 4.

Average Annual and Daily Wages of Agricultural Labours (₹)

Size of Land Holdings (Acres)	Average Daily Wages	Average Annual Wages
Landless	110	6261
Below 1	109	5567
1.00–2.5	107	5833
2.50–5.00	130	9100
Total	110	6131

Source: GIDS Survey on Rural Transformation, 2013.

Table 4 reveals the interconnection between the bargaining power of an agricultural labourer and land ownership of his/her household. Smaller land ownership categories tend to cluster at lower wages due to their desperation whereas higher land ownership provides sustenance. One’s annual income also varies with a land ownership pattern, but on an average, an agricultural labourer earns a little over ₹6000 yearly or ₹500 per month that is much below the poverty line. Historically, labour relations of Senapur are changing but they do not represent a complete break from the past. As in the 1950s, dalits still provide labour to farming. But they are no more solely dependent on agriculture. Unlike the past, agricultural wages are in cash and fluctuate in tune with the demand and supply of labour.

Non-agriculture Employment

The labour relations outlined above cannot be understood in isolation. Non-agriculture employment holds the key to the understanding of these relationships. And jobs outside agriculture, particularly outside the village, is not a new thing for the residents of Senapur. Cohn (1958) conducted a survey in 1952 and found that, ‘except two primary school teachers and a compounder, all the dalits who were employed out of the village had unskilled labouring jobs.’ Cohn further claims that, ‘during the colonial period some of them worked as menial servants in British households. The majority of adult male dalits had at one point or another worked away from the village. The Thakurs of Senapur were much better educated than the dalits.’

Cohn’s studies tell us that the agrarian hierarchy had reproduced itself outside the village also. The same appears to be true about the people of Senapur even today. People have been migrating from this village for a long time. And long-term migration for white collar jobs is not a new phenomenon for the people of this village. Some of the families who migrated permanently do not get reflected in this data. This survey reveals that some dalits have been able to avail opportunities thrown up by the state’s policies of affirmative action but their relative position vis-à-vis the so called upper caste people have not altered completely.

The present study identifies three major avenues of employment where the shift from agriculture is taking place—construction, self-employment and government scheme work. With the decline of manufacturing, construction has emerged as the only source of new job opportunities for a variety of workers, mainly unskilled and semi-skilled. In Senapur also, almost three-fifths of all non-agrarian workers were employed in the construction industry. After construction, and leaving apart government schemes, no other sector was able to generate employment. In last few years, the union government and the state government have launched some schemes in the field of education, health, employment and so on. The National Rural Health Mission, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, Integrated Child Development Scheme are among these schemes that recruit people to work as Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHA), Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANM) and Shiksha Mitras (para-teachers). These schemes are another avenue of employment for those who have attained some degree of education and skill.

What is more interesting to note is the continued emergence of animal husbandry as a more important source of income especially for OBC and SC households. In fact, landless and marginal households are found generating a larger share of their earnings from animal husbandry. For them, livestock is not just a complementary to crop income but exceeds it. This might relate to diminishing returns from crop production especially cereals, shrinking opportunities for wage labour in agriculture and expanding demand for animal products.

Further, the classification of workers into static categories such as rural/urban, agriculture/construction, migrant/local is becoming increasing difficult for social scientists. Rotation of workers between different jobs at different places in a year has become such a widespread phenomenon that it seems to have converted larger part of workers into a floating population.

Technology, Productivity and Market Linkages

Table 5 presents the share of each item in total inputs. Labour wages are the largest input for OBC and general households. For dalits, land rent remains the biggest input. Looking at the land ownership structure of the village, this data confirms landlessness among dalits. This also reflects the common use of hired labour among all social groups but it is the highest among general households. All social groups use chemical fertilisers and pesticides, but expenditure on seeds is slightly higher among general households and lowest among dalits reflecting the quality of seeds used by this social group.

Table 5.

Composition of Inputs by Social Group

S.N.	Heads of cost	General	OBC	SC	Total
1.	Labour Wages	22.29	19.24	15.99	20.36
2.	Ox and Other Animals	0.03	0.85	0.21	0.20
3.	Machine and Equipment	15.94	16.02	14.52	15.62
4	Irrigation Equipment	5.33	3.29	1.39	4.11
5	Seeds	12.24	10.85	9.10	11.30
6	Chemical Fertilisers	17.05	18.29	15.44	16.87
7	Compost Fertiliser	3.97	5.36	3.31	4.03
8	Pesticides	4.99	5.47	3.81	4.79
9	Interest on Capital Borrowed	2.11	0.00	0.28	1.36
10	Land Rent	3.55	5.16	22.20	8.11
11	Rent/Taxes Paid	8.08	10.72	10.91	9.14
12	Transportation Cost	4.09	4.08	2.85	3.80
13	Any Other Input Cost	0.33	0.64	0.00	0.30
	Total	100.00	100.00	100.00	100.00

Source: GIDS Survey on Rural Transformation, 2013.

This data also reveals the complete replacement of animals by machines even amongst the poor classes; animals contribute only 0.20 per cent to inputs and machines contribute over 15 per cent. This entire agricultural scenario reflects a typical post-Green Revolution scene with machines, seeds, chemical fertilisers and pesticides making up most of the inputs. But these supposedly ‘capitalist farming’ practices were implanted on a different type of land ownership structure. That is why we still see that almost one-fifth of the total input by the landless class is usurped by the landed class in the form of land rent. Further, because of land rent payment, these peasants have to resort to cost cutting on chemical fertilisers, irrigation equipment, agricultural machines and seeds, all of which effectively impacts their productivity. Looking at it from this angle, the skewed land ownership structure appears to be a drag on the development of agriculture.

This village represents the typical cropping pattern of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Rice in the kharif cropping season and wheat in the rabi season are principal crops that are grown on vast parts of the land. Rice covers around 82 per cent of the cropped area during the kharif season and wheat is sown in 72 per cent of land during the rabi season. Kharif pulses are the second major crop, followed by coarse grain, groundnut and oil seed. In the rabi season, vegetables and oil seeds are grown by farmers. Besides, sugarcane and rabi pulses are also grown.

In this village, the average yield of paddy stands at 14 quintals per acre which mean around nine quintals of rice per acre (taking into consideration around 65 per cent yield of rice from paddy. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the average Indian rice yield is 2.3 tonnes per hectare which works out to be 9.3 quintals per acre. The global average is about 4.3 tonnes per hectare, that is, 17 quintals per acre. In wheat, the average global yield stands at 12 quintals per acre, and the Indian average are very close to this figure. The farmers of Senapur grow about 11 quintals per acre.

But in spite of this high yield, when it comes to getting a decent price for their produce the farmers of Senapur village suffer substantial losses. For wheat, on an average, they get ₹1,082 per quintal which is much less than the minimum support price (MSP) of ₹1,350 declared by the government for the year 2012–2013. Similarly, as against the MSP of ₹1,250 per quintal for the common variety of paddy in the year 2012–2013, farmers of this village get only ₹944 per quintal. It seems that the reach of the formal marketing channels that are bound to honour the MSP is very limited. Farmers of all classes report their dependence on private players for the sale of their produce. Local business men, those who buy from farmers at lower than MSP prices and sell it to private companies; bigger business people in towns and government procurement agencies are the mainstay of at least a quarter of the farmers. Retailers are the most active players in the rural agricultural market to whom around two-fifths farmers sell their produce. Another quarter of farmers sells directly to consumers.

From the household survey data on the disposal of agricultural output, it is clear that dalits produce around 70 per cent for self-consumption, OBCs consume more than half of their produce, but for households belonging to the general category, this proportion comes down to 30 per cent. This implies that the three social groups, general, OBCs and SCs, generate a marketable surplus to the tune of 70, 42 and 29 per cent of their agricultural output respectively. However, this data does not throw any light on the aspect of distress sale that will significantly alter one’s conclusion.

Changing Caste Relations

Several studies refer to the withdrawal of dalits from an agrarian economy primarily for social and political reasons. If the proportion of dalit families, solely dependent on agriculture, goes down due to their increasing representation in other employment sources, this may lead to their greater freedom (Jodhka, 2014; Trivedi, 2007).

But the Senapur story is a bit different. Instead of following the typical trajectory—economic freedom to political freedom—dalits of this village chose to assert their socio-political freedom at a time when they were largely dependent on the landowning classes for their livelihood regarding land and wages. This all started in the early seventies when dalits here formed a left-leaning organisation, Kisan Sangharsh Samiti, which decided to boycott the two menial jobs traditionally assigned to them—the skinning of dead animals and assistance in the delivery of babies. As expected, this elicited a violent retaliation from the landed class. An economic sanction was imposed on dalits, leased-out land was withdrawn, and their movements through lands owned by Thakurs was restricted. But all kinds of suppression could not sway the protesters and the two age-old traditions witnessed sudden death.

As stated earlier, dalits still cultivate land owned by Thakurs as tenants and work on their fields as wage labour. The power structure of the village appears tilted towards the wealthy class who own most of the village resources. But the dalits have carved out a space of their own by continuously asserting their political autonomy. Thakurs do try to regain their lost power over dalits, but this does not go uncontested from dalits. Srivastava (2016) narrates a similar story of Belapur where a clash between dalits and upper caste landowners in the early nineties redefined power relations between the two groups. He also underlines that among dalits, households that participated in the struggle against upper caste dominance are less dependent currently than those who chose to stay away from it.

Concluding Discussion

If we quickly sum up some main observations about the agrarian relations of Senapur, we find that the land ownership pattern of Senapur is marked by a decreasing size of land holdings while the inequalities between different social groups remain.

Sharecropping appears to be the dominant form of tenancy; reverse tenancy seems to be almost negligible because of a high incidence of landlessness and the out-migration of landowners as agriculture becomes increasingly less profitable. It is also noted that both cultivators and agricultural labour are migrating from the farm sector and a drop in the proportion of agricultural labour is enormous. Qualitative observations reveal that those landowners who have shifted out of cultivation prefer to lease out their land instead of selling it. The ‘eradication of small farmers’ doesn’t seem a perceptible phenomenon in Senapur. However, families solely dependent on agriculture are rare to find. Farming families augment income from other sources to keep their small farms going. Harriss, Jeyaranjan, & Nagaraj (2010) also notes that, ‘small scale farming has continued to reproduce itself’. They also find that, ‘classes of labour have to pursue their reproduction through a combination of insecure employment and self-employment activities spread across rural and urban, agricultural and non-agricultural settings.’

Another unintended consequence of these technical changes is rising agricultural wages in cash which accompany falling incomes from agricultural labour wages. Most studies refer to rising agricultural wages, but they overlook drastically reducing the period for which agricultural labour is required in the new technological regime. This appears to result in a declining overall income from wages in a year. The Senapur study shows that income from agricultural wages remains much lower than Below the Poverty Line (BPL) levels. Some studies (Trivedi, 2011) have documented an interlocking arrangement of land, labour and credit in the cash-crop growing parts of the state but this village study has not found any piece of evidence to suggest a linkage between labour and means of production. Interlocking has always seen associated with a ‘backward agriculture’ (Bhaduri, 1973) but in recent times such instances are captured by researches in regions of developed agriculture rather than in regions of relatively backward agriculture. This demands a fresh look at the entire gamut of issues.

The disposal of agricultural produce differs among social groups. If ‘general’ category farmers primarily produce for the market, dalits mainly produce for self-consumption but also sell a part of their produce in the market. At the same time, the use of chemical fertilisers, pesticides, high yield variety seeds, irrigation and labour displacing equipment is on the rise. The global yield-levels of wheat and rice are also comparable to Indian averages.

The question arises then, how do we reconcile these seemingly different trajectories? The use of hired labour, a significant increase in agricultural production, productivity and production for market are strong indications of changing agrarian relations. At the same time, the continued hold of ex-landlords on agricultural land and sharecropping is seen as a drag on the further development of agriculture. It appears that several old practices that were considered backward at a point have mutated themselves into newer forms. To come out with a more accurate analysis of nature and character of agrarian relations in this area, several questions thrown up by this study need a thorough probe. Socio-political processes appear to have a close interface with changing agrarian relations, an aspect that has been captured by other recent investigations, too (Jodhka, 2014; Srivastava, 2016). Moreover, an agricultural economy never exists in isolation. For a clearer picture, these agrarian changes need to be located in a changing macro-economic context. Further, the integration of agrarian and non-agrarian economy also demands a fresh look at several methodological questions.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author is thankful to Prof. Surinder Kumar, Director, GIDS and Prof. A. K. Singh for their extensive comments on an earlier draft of this article. Prof. B. K. Bajpai’s support is also thankfully acknowledged. This research was supported by the Indian Council for Social Science Research, New Delhi.

Note

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