Agrarian differentiation,land,and tenancy under neoliberalism: A class analysis of rural West Bengal

This paper examines how neoliberal restructuring has reshaped agrarian inequality in West Bengal by altering patterns of differentiation among rural households. It addresses two questions: how neoliberal policies have altered the distribution of access to various means of production, and how these inequalities are reproduced through land ownership, operational holdings, and tenancy arrangements. The analysis combines secondary data from the Agricultural Census and the National Sample Survey Office’s Survey of Land and Livestock Holdings with primary evidence from a 2020–2021 field survey of 200 cultivator households in Bankura district. Households are classified using both acreage-based categories and Patnaik’s Labour Exploitation Criterion (E-criterion), which distinguishes economic position through labour absorption rather than land size alone. The findings show that productive resources, non-land assets, and operational control over land are increasingly concentrated among labour-hiring households, while labour-selling households rely heavily on leasing in land to sustain cultivation. Tenancy thus emerges as a key mechanism through which agrarian inequality is reproduced under contemporary conditions. The study demonstrates the analytical value of a class-based approach for understanding agrarian change in West Bengal in the neoliberal era.