Agrarian Programme

Preamble

Agriculture continues to be a key component of our economy. Even as the contribution of agriculture to India’s GDP has dropped to less than 20%, more than half of India’s population – nearly three-fourths of India’s rural population – still remains engaged in this sector.

Agrarian revolution is the axis of democratic revolution in India and the land question is the basic question of this revolution. Advancing the struggle of the rural proletariat and the peasantry to abolish landlordism and other feudal remnants thoroughly, free agriculture from the domination of big capital and the stranglehold of imperialism and transform all social relations and political institutions – this constitutes the essence of the agrarian question.

Our approach to the agrarian question in general and to specific peasant demands in particular is to facilitate development of class struggle in the countryside. Subordinating every demand to the advancement of class struggle against the landlord-kulak nexus in the countryside is the central point in the agrarian question.

Tireless efforts are needed to promote the alliance between the class-conscious proletariat and the revolutionary peasantry while preparing for the inevitable high tide of peasant struggles. As the Communist International had pointed out, “The proletariat is a really revolutionary class and acts in a really Socialist manner only when it comes out and acts as the vanguard of all the working and exploited people, as their leader in the struggle for the overthrow of the exploiters; this, however, cannot be achieved unless the class struggle is carried into the countryside...” (Preliminary Draft Theses on the Agrarian Question, Communist International, Second Congress, 1920).

Far-reaching changes have taken place in Indian agriculture in the last three decades. In order to develop class struggle in the countryside and to solve the agrarian problem from the standpoint of the proletariat, the Party should clarify its guiding principles of the Party policy in relation to agriculture, various classes and strata of the rural population. Hence the need for a comprehensive agrarian programme enunciating the proletarian viewpoint to intervene in the agrarian arena and advance through the complex maze of class relations in the countryside.

I. Evolution of Indian Agriculture in the Post-Colonial Era

India being a predominantly rural and agricultural country, British colonialists were quick to realize that they could not possibly prolong and consolidate their rule without ensuring a high degree of stability in the agrarian economy. The colonial period thus witnessed a series of bourgeois interventions in the agrarian arena that sought to restructure the rural society without jeopardizing, let alone eliminating, the feudal survivals. The Indian ruling classes too followed essentially a similar approach after Independence.

In the 1950s, statutory landlordism was abolished with compensation of about Rs.600 crore given to landlords by peasants through the state. Nearly 20 million tenants were thus brought into the purview of direct relationship with the state. The greatest beneficiaries of land reforms programme were occupancy tenants, a large section of whom had already turned into landlords. The greatest sufferers of the reforms were tenants-at-will, who were evicted in hundreds of thousands by landlords in the name of resuming self-cultivation. The land ceiling acts were so framed and implemented that they gave landlords enough scope to hide their surplus land on a large scale and continue with oral tenancy on onerous terms for the poor peasants.

From the class point of view, we can say the land reforms measures were aimed at nothing beyond a redistribution of land among the propertied sections. It is not surprising, therefore, that after more than five decades of land reforms and enactment of as many as 277 land reform laws across the country, according to the National Commission on Rural Labour, only 2% of the operated area in the country has been redistributed and ownership rights conferred on tenants only with respect to 4.42% of the area operated by them.

In 2004, the Union government informed Parliament that out of an original estimate of surplus land of 63 million acres, the total quantum of land declared surplus in the entire country was 73.74 lakh acres, out of which only 65.11 lakh acres have been acquired by various state governments and out of that only 53.05 lakh acres have been distributed. Thus nearly 90% of the surplus land has not been acquired at all.

However, one important result of the land reform measures from the economic point of view has been that cultivation by hired labour has considerably increased and tenancy has declined to a great extent. And this is how the first steps were taken towards the Indian type of landlord path of capitalist development. The land reform measures and accompanying community development programmes of the 1950s could not understandably make any breakthrough in agricultural production and, in the latter part of the 1950s and early 1960s, India had to import huge quantities of foodgrains from America under the PL 480 scheme. In the middle of the 1960s came the Green Revolution – the final plank of the first phase of the strategy of the Indian ruling classes.

HYV seeds, chemical fertilisers, pesticides, controlled water supply – a package comprising all these elements was the major feature of the New Agrarian Strategy introduced in 1964-65 with the active help of American imperialism. Considering the huge amount of cash expenditure required to take up this package and the easy availability of bank loans and cooperative credit to the landlords and the rich peasants, it was clear as day light that from the class viewpoint this strategy depended upon the landlords and the rich peasants, thus creating wider disparity in the countryside with further pauperisation of the poor and lower-middle peasantry. Besides, as this strategy was implemented only in some select pockets of certain states, glaring regional imbalances were created.

The green revolution strategy, which led to further development of the Indian type of landlord path of capitalist development, had a narrow social base and was superimposed on the predominant semi-feudal economy. The strategy therefore began to show its first signs of crisis and unsustainability soon after its introduction.

In the early 1960s, the prices of petroleum, the major feedstock of fertiliser plants, were quite low in the world market. But with sharp and steady rise in the international prices of oil since the beginning of the 1970s, plans for extending this green revolution to other parts of India suffered a setback and even areas of green revolution began to face serious problems. As input costs rose, farmers began demanding remunerative prices, but the prices of agricultural output could not match the pace of the rise in prices of industrial goods and input costs, eroding the profitability of agriculture.

Even as green revolution ran out of steam and the crisis began to deepen, the adoption of neo-liberal industrial and economic policies in the early 1990s, their extension to the realm of agriculture and subjection of Indian agriculture to the WTO regime triggered a disaster of unprecedented proportions. Most of the advanced areas of green revolution have been hit seriously by this disaster driving tens of thousands of small and marginal farmers to suicide every year.

Instead of reversing its agrarian strategy the ruling classes are however trying to wriggle out of the crisis through desperate application of more of the same medicine. Land reform laws are being sought to be reversed to facilitate greater capitalist concentration of landholding and corporatization of agriculture. Reverse land reforms legislations have already been passed in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat while attempts are on in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Kerala. Small farmers are being sought to be subjected to contract farming, if not eased out of agriculture itself.

II. Basic Features of Indian Agriculture

In spite of considerable changes in technique and improvement in productivity, the general conditions of Indian agriculture continue to reveal its semi-feudal characteristics that are interwoven with a host of semi-colonial features. Under the landlord path of capitalism adopted by the Indian ruling classes, penetration of capitalist relations is very slow, uneven and shallow. In fact, the forces of capitalism are entering into hybrid relations with feudal remnants. The feudal remnants like bondage, usury and other forms of tied relations have been adopted by the capitalist landlords and kulaks for extraction of absolute surplus value. Thus, the semi-feudal ‘extra-economic’ coercion is an essential part of newly expanding capitalist relations, which hinders the free development of capitalist forces among the peasantry.

Though commercialisation in Indian agriculture is now more or less generalised, majority of the poor and middle peasants are still trapped in subsistence or near-subsistence farming, including those who take a part or whole of their produce to the market for the sake of exchanging it for consumption goods. The entire state policy is geared to promoting the landlord path of capitalism based on a narrow stratum of capitalist landlords and capitalist farmers, especially kulaks, who grab lion’s share of state’s resources flowing into agriculture. The broad mass of poor and middle peasantry, apart from groaning under the yoke of semi-feudal remnants, are at the receiving end of the expanding forces of capitalism, viz. these new landlords and kulaks and are oppressed by these classes. Land reforms have neither given them land nor ensured their freedom. Though nominally free from serfdom and zamindari they find themselves semi-enslaved by the oppressive forces of semi-feudalism and distorted capitalism promoted from above.

The shifting agrarian strategy of the ruling classes under policies of liberalisation and globalisation reinforces the pro-kulak bias of the state policy and accentuates the inequalities among agrarian classes and provides for the direct penetration of imperialist finance capital into agriculture.

a) Persistence of Feudal Survivals

Statutory abolition of old pattern of zamindari as well as other forms of large-scale landlordism akin to serfdom has spawned a downsized landlordism of both old and new variety and an alliance of bourgeoisie with these landlords. While new capitalist landlords employ capitalist methods of production and employ hired labour, they freely resort to various forms of extra-economic coercion. With the intensification of agrarian crisis features like usury and bondage have resurfaced quite aggressively in many areas of advanced agriculture as well. Side by side with this new type of landlordism, old-type landlordism, including absentee landlordism, too exists quite extensively, extracting surplus in a semi-feudal manner from tenants and sharecroppers. The predominance of absolute ground rent in such tenancies, whether legal or illegal, acts as a major barrier to the free development of capitalism.

Despite so-called land reforms, land ownership and operational holding patterns are highly skewed. In terms of ownership, marginal (0.01-2.49 acres) and small (2.50-4.99 acres) holdings account for 80.4 per cent of total holdings, but together they own only 43.43 per cent of the total owned agricultural land while medium (10-24.99 acres) and large (25 acres and above) holdings, though numbering only 3.6 per cent of total holdings own 34.63 per cent of the total (all figures are from 2003 NSSO data). The degree of landlessness among rural households has been on the increase. Totally landless households among rural households have risen from 25 per cent in 1987-88 to 41 per cent in 1999-2000. In fact, these figures understate the real proportion of landless households, for households owning a meager 0.01 acre are included in the marginal and not landless category. The decline in the proportion of medium and large holdings is also deceptively overstated because it hides the phenomenon of benami transfers.

The figures of distribution of operational holding reflect a largely similar pattern, but they also reflect a significant degree of reverse tenancy (hiring in of the land of poor peasants by rich and well-to-do farmers) – while 3.6% of total ownership holdings belong to the 10 acres and above range, 7.4% operational holdings belong to this range.

Though reverse tenancy is sizable and cash rent is widespread, the form of money rent, by itself, does not indicate the development of capitalist relations in tenancy. This is because, in most cases, the money rent does not represent capitalist ground rent over and above “normal” profit to the cultivator. Rather, it represents some arbitrary surplus extraction by the landowners, often using all forms of extra-economic coercion, including even forms of labour service.

The land market is also not free. It is highly distorted by the semi-feudal landlordism marked by excessive rent extraction and forcible grabbing of the land of the poor through under-pricing over and above the monopoly landownership. New land concentration is also taking place side by side.

Despite the apparent development of a class of “free” agricultural proletariat, the agrarian labourers, and the labour market in agriculture, are not really free in most of the cases and labour relations are marked by all sorts of semi-feudal distortion and extra-economic coercion including caste dominance.

Despite huge expansion of institutional credit, the share of agricultural lending by moneylenders and private usurers remains the dominant segment and their usurious interest rates often bear no relations to the normal rates of profit in production.

b) Growing Penetration of Imperialist Capital

The green revolution ushered in the penetration of foreign capital into Indian agriculture through an expanding market for foreign fertilizer, seeds and pesticides companies and introduced a semi-colonial dimension to Indian agriculture. Of late, in the post-green revolution era, this dimension has been strengthened further following the opening of agricultural trade under the WTO and entry of MNC firms into wholesale and retail trade and contract and corporate farming. Their stranglehold on the traditional seeds and pesticides business has also been tightened. Monsanto, the seeds multinational, has introduced the controversial GM crops into India.

100 per cent FDI in floriculture, horticulture, seeds farming, animal husbandry, pisciculture and aquaculture has already been allowed and a move to allow FDI in general into agriculture was postponed due to resistance from farmers’ organisations. FDI into agro-processing too has been allowed threatening small and traditional agro-processing and home-based agro-processing by farmers. Under the terms of the US-India Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture (KIA), the scientific human resources and facilities of Indian agricultural research establishments have been placed at the disposal of the US multinational for conducting research in frontier biotechnology areas. Both Wal-Mart and Monsanto have their representatives on the governing board of this US-India KIA. Speculative finance has also begun making forays into agriculture with central governments allowing commodity futures, commodity hedging and forward trading in agricultural commodities, which is particularly responsible for triggering occasional escalations in prices of agro-based articles of mass consumption.

The World Bank has been quite nakedly pushing the interests of private export and trading houses, especially in cotton in Maharashtra, and the monopoly procurement by the Cotton Corporation, which served the farmers for decades, is being systematically dismantled in Maharashtra and this is the main source of cotton farmers’ crisis in that state. The exploitation of child labour of young girls in the floriculture farms of Karnataka and MNC cotton seed farms in AP including the one under Unilever is fairly well known; and death of many of these girls due to pesticide poisoning came into international limelight. Contract-farmers are routinely underpaid by MNCs – cases of PepsiCo cheating tomato farmers in Punjab and FritoLay doing the same to potato growers in West Bengal are quite well recorded.

All these forms of penetration of big and multinational capital into Indian agriculture point to growing semi-colonial character of Indian agriculture.

c) Shallowness of Capitalist Development

In most regions, merchant capital dominates productive capital in agriculture and now big capital is also making rapid inroads through organized retail and wholesale trade, corporate and contract farming and forward trading etc.

Even where a small section of the peasantry is making a surplus and profit, the profit is not fully reinvested in extended reproduction in agriculture but the bulk of it gets diverted into luxurious consumption or unproductive business channels and a huge part of it gets siphoned off to non-farm sector. On the whole, the penetration of capitalist relations – in terms of investment, mechanization, land market and tenancy relations, labour relations, and accumulation – remains very shallow, even in some of the green revolution regions.

Whatever little agricultural growth is there, that is also primarily credit driven – total outstanding institutional credit to agriculture reached around Rs.2,25,000 crore by October 2007. The latest available CSO figure for agriculture GDP (at constant 1990-91 prices) was Rs.5,66,275 crore in 2005-06. Only a small part of this credit generates adequate income and profit among a very thin layer to enable reinvestment and extended reproduction. Accumulation of wealth by capitalist and semi-feudal landlords through various means of primitive accumulation, semi-feudal forms of exploitation and extra-economic coercion is more than capitalist accumulation in agriculture proper. A good part of the capital generated in agriculture is diverted into usury, moneylending, contracts, trade, real estate and other non-farm avenues.

The total capital formation in agriculture in 1999-2000 was Rs.21388 crore but the total institutional credit to agriculture that year was Rs.46268 crore. Since the CSO data on capital formation refers to fixed capital investments and private sector accounts for three-fourths of this, the above figure shows that more than half of the bank credit goes into current expenses (circulating) capital or consumption expenses.

Compared to the relatively higher spread of the HYV area in purely geographic terms, a recent NSSO study says 60 per cent of the farming households have no access to the modern technology.

The fertilizer consumption in India per hectare of net sown area was 106.5 kg per hectare in 1999-2000 (94.8 kg per hectare for gross cropped area) and the same figure for other countries were: 359.8 for Egypt, 206.9 for Chile, 154 for Bangladesh, 271 for China, 296.3 for Japan, 459.2 for S.Korea, 129 for Pakistan, 136.3 for Sri Lanka, 164.3 for Austria, 135.6 for Belarus, 358.5 for Belgium, 169.9 for Denmark, 243.5 for France, 252 for Germany, 500.5 for Netherlands, 226.9 for Norway, 124.9 for Spain, 342.8 for UK, and 204 for New Zealand.

There can be no capitalist development in agriculture without the development of rural infrastructure. The Rural Infrastructure Development Funds are at a paltry Rs. 4000-5000 crore whereas the requirements projected for development of industrial infrastructure are astronomically higher - $460 billions (around Rs. 20,00,000 crore)!

d) Perennial Crisis of Landlord Path of Capitalist Development

Given the uneven spread of land and capital resources among different size-classes and the narrow base of agrarian capitalism, the landlord path of capitalist development in Indian agriculture has all along been moving from one crisis to another. But this deeper and chronic structural crisis has assumed acute proportions with the adoption of neo-liberal policies and their extension to agriculture and subjection of agriculture to the WTO regime. The shocking phenomenon of farmers’ suicides going on for more than a decade now can only be comprehended in conjunction with the more perennial forms and factors of agrarian crisis like heavy indebtedness, stagnation in production and productivity caused by sharp decline in public investment and capital formation, lack of irrigation facilities, trade liberalisation, a price precipice of higher input prices and lower output prices, declining farm incomes and per capita incomes, growing incidence of poverty even among farming households with declining consumption and decreasing per capita food availability, lingering crisis in dryland farming, inadequate institutional credit and persistence of usurious private money-lending, severe infrastructural crisis, and above all, continuing skewed landownership and land tenure patterns. A growing ecological crisis and frequent “natural” disasters due to climate change, the recent stagnation in non-farm growth, and an unprecedented corporate land-grab have only added to the severity of the agrarian crisis.

Even as the graph of suicides shows no sign of going down and food security becomes endangered with India once again resorting to foodgrain imports, ideologues of the ruling classes continue to downplay the crisis as a transient one limited to certain regions, crops and seasons. Even the World Bank in its 2008 World Development Report devoted to agriculture makes only a passing mention of the rash of suicides in India and calls it merely a perceived situation of crisis! Far from increasing the net sown area by adopting adequate soil conservation and land reclamation measures and expanding irrigation facilities, the ruling elite would like us to believe that we have almost reached a saturation point in agriculture. Instead of freeing small and marginal peasants from their debt burden, the state essentially treats the agrarian crisis as an opportunity to ease out small peasants from agriculture. Tall claims are being made about shifting people from agriculture to non-farm sectors, but non-farm employment is certainly not growing at a rate which might absorb part of the present-day agricultural population. In other words disruption of small peasant agriculture can only result in pauperization and creation of a huge surplus population in agriculture, prolonging and aggravating the agrarian crisis and further jeopardizing India’s food security in the process.

III. Classes in the Indian Countryside

With the rise of a significant non-farm sector in the rural economy (brick kilns, construction, and a rapidly expanding service sector) non-agrarian classes also coexist in the countryside with essentially agrarian classes, but more often than not they are interconnected through a plethora of ties and possess a combined character. Broadly speaking, in areas of significant capitalist development we can see the rural society split into two opposite classes – the rural bourgeoisie and the rural proletariat – with a sizable population in the middle (a shrinking middle peasantry and a growing rural middle class comprising small shopkeepers, teachers, employees and so on).

Rural Bourgeoisie

This class comprises both the agrarian bourgeoisie – the peasant bourgeoisie or kulaks and capitalist landlords – as well as the non-agrarian bourgeoisie. The non-agrarian bourgeoisie engages in non-farm production, trade and money-lending. They also act as contractors for government projects. They are also the agents for big business corporate houses in retail or wholesale business, as well as contract and corporate farming. They also exercise a considerable hold over the local economy, trade and private transport. Both capitalist landlords and other non-agrarian rural bourgeois elements dominate over panchayats, cooperative societies, Water Users Associations (WUAs), Self-Help Groups (SHGs), and other such bodies and they have numerous links with the bureaucracy and dominate the local rungs of reactionary political parties and exercise their sway over the village power structure.

Rural Proletariat

Apart from the agricultural proletariat – agricultural labourers and the poor peasants (semi-proletariat) – the rural proletariat comprises a sizable section of non-farm workers. Even a large section of the so-called self-employed – those doing market-contracted home-based work – fall within the ambit of labour relations. There is a considerable degree of overlap between agricultural labourers and non-farm workers in the rural areas as mainly labourers doing primarily wage work in agriculture also work in some non-farm occupations during off-seasons and many workers who primarily do non-farm wage work also do some wage work in agriculture.

Agrarian Classes

Landlords

Those who own huge amounts of land and implements of production, do not engage in physical labour directly and live solely by exploiting peasants and agricultural labourers are termed as landlords. In the conditions obtaining in India, they can be divided into two types:

1. Old type of landlords: Those who exploit the peasants by leasing out their lands on exorbitant rents, keep bonded labourers, practise usury, hoarding and various other forms of feudal exploitation fall in this category. Many of them are absentee landlords.
2. New type of landlords: Those who own modern means of production, employ hired labourers for work, and on their part take up only managerial work, fall in this category.

These landlords in our country also lease out one part of their land and exploit hired labour in the other part, keep labourers attached in various forms, work as intermediaries in the distribution of inputs, engage in lending on interest at higher rates the bank loans they manage at a lower rate, resort to black-marketeering, hire out instruments of production to small and medium peasants and so on. They are often termed as managerial or capitalist landlords.

The landlords, particularly the new type of landlords, nowadays wield political power in villages and are extremely reactionary and hence a target of the democratic revolution. Moneylenders, big traders, and bankrupt landlords who live on swindling and maintain the standard of life of the middle peasants should also be treated as landlords. Similarly, rich peasants who remain tyrannically opposed to poor and middle peasants, and the lumpen sections, who have emerged as the byproduct of the green revolution and act as intermediaries between government officials and landlords, engage in all sorts of anti-social activities and take active part in local politics and lead counter-revolutionary gangs should also be treated as extended members of the class of landlords.

Landlords operate in close nexus with corrupt government officials and local bullies, bad gentry and despotic elements in the countryside.

In dealing with the landlords, differentiation should be made between –

1. bad and enlightened gentry;
2. big, medium and small landlords; and
3. the landlords who resist and the landlords who surrender.

Rich Peasants

Those who possess considerable amounts of land, either fully owned or partly owned and partly leased in, or totally leased in, as well as modern implements, and who themselves engage in labour but mainly live by exploiting hired labourers are termed as rich peasants.

1. A rich peasant is a person whose major part of income, i.e., more than 50 per cent of income, comes from exploitation. He often engages in usury and other forms of feudal exploitation and is also engaged in trade and commerce.
   
2. A capitalist farmer is a rich or well-to-do peasant turned capitalist entrepreneur. He engages in intensive cultivation, adopts modern technology, produces for the market and exploits free labour. They earn a surplus over the capital invested in cultivation In Indian conditions, these farmers also exhibit certain feudal traits but that is less marked compared to the old type of rich peasants. They have connections as well as contradictions with the capitalist landlords. On certain occasions they oppose big capital and the state.
   

These new type of rich peasants are also called kulaks or agrarian or peasant bourgeoisie.

Often a section of the rich peasants act as counter-revolutionaries and become a target of the revolution. However, the majority of them can be neutralised and a section can even be won over to the side of the revolution. Rich peasants and capitalist farmers can be unstable allies in the struggle against imperialism but in the struggle against landlords, they can at most be neutralised. Neutralisation requires compromise as well as restriction. Tactics regarding them should be one of unity and struggle. The main difference between landlords and rich peasants is that whereas landlords do not take part in direct labour, rich peasants do engage in labour.

Middle Peasants

Middle peasants are those who posses small or medium-sized holdings; either owned by them or leased in, and also instruments of production inferior to those of the rich peasants but superior to those of the poor peasants. They take an active part in labour along with their families. Generally, they neither sell nor purchase labour power. But in the busy seasons of cropping they hire some labour. They can be broadly divided into three categories:

1. Upper middle peasants: Those who exploit labour but the income so earned does not exceed 50 per cent of their total income. That is, the main source of their income is their own labour. They get some surplus, accumulate to move into the ranks of rich peasants or kualks or peasant bourgeoisie over a period. Many of them often side with reactionaries against poor or lower-middle peasants.
2. Middle middle peasants: Those who earn 75 per cent of their income from their own labour, so that the extent of exploitation does not exceed 25 per cent. The very little surplus they earn is hardly sufficient to reinvest on an extended scale and carry on extended reproduction in agriculture.
3. Lower middle peasants: They have to lease in land at high rates. They find it difficult to make both ends meet and are burdened with loans and interests of moneylenders. They hardly make any surplus and always run the risk of lapsing into the category of poor peasants.

Middle peasants want to develop production and employ modern means of production, but this often leads them into a debt-trap and distress sale of their produce. On the question of leasing in land, use of modern inputs, getting their legitimate share in panchayats, cooperative societies, SHGs and other such institutions and on the question of arbitrary taxation by the kulaks and landlords in WUAs, they are in sharp contradiction with landlords, rich peasants and government officials. However, they also have a relation of dependence with small and medium landlords and rich peasants.

They are allies of poor peasants but so long as the poor peasants remain weak they continue to vacillate. They must be united and by broad peasant unity we mean essentially the unity of the poor and the middle peasants.

In class analysis, often the problem of confusing higher middle peasants, i.e., well-to-do middle peasants, with rich peasants crop up. And hence special care must be taken on this question. While the rich peasants’ main source of income is exploitation, for middle peasant it is his own labour.

Poor Peasants

Poor peasants either do not own any land and implements or own a small amount of land and implements of poor quality or only some implements. They work on their own small plots or lease in some land or work on the landlords’ land and in exchange get a tiny patch of land, the entire produce of which, or a part thereof, they are entitled to get. Still they are hardly able to manage six months this way. For the rest of the year, they have to sell their labour power. They also engage in petty trades and other side-line occupations. They are forced to resort to loans from moneylenders and landlords, which they are never able to repay. They suffer cruel oppression in the hand of landlords and traders. They usually have to sell a part of their produce at very cheap rates to pay for the interest on loans and to purchase daily necessities. It is on them that the agrarian revolution relies.

Poor peasants differ from the middle peasants in that the middle peasants need not sell their labour power whereas the poor peasants are forced to sell it. Poor peasants thus constitute the semi-proletariat and they usually tend to side with the rural proletariat.

Agricultural Labourers

Owning neither land nor implements, nor even proper house-sites, they live solely by selling their labour power. They are the predominant section of the rural proletariat. A section of them are free labourers, paid in cash or kind or in both. With the emergence of capitalist farming in agriculture, their number is rising and they are getting organised. However, they also suffer from cruel feudal exploitation in many cases and their problems are closely related to those of the poor peasants. In lean seasons they do not get jobs and are forced to work on lowest wages. They have to resort to seasonal migration in search of work, are subjected to cheating and cruel exploitation by agent-contractors, landlords and the police. In some regions, agricultural labourers resort to group-labour for contract, often at piece rate, under labour contractors in local agriculture itself.
A very minor section of farm labourers are engaged in permanent and regular jobs in mechanised farms. Other sections of farm labourers are mostly casual, day-labourers, while few of them live in conditions of bondage and semi-bondage, working on seasonal or yearly basis. In many cases in several regions, they are to work for 14 to 15 hours a day and are subjected to worst form of social indignities including caste atrocities. Those who resist are assaulted and even killed.
The main difference between the agricultural labourer and the poor peasant is that while the former gets a fixed wage in cash or in kind or in both for the sale of his/her labour power, at least a part of the latter’s required subsistence is directly produced by him/her for himself/herself as a holder of self-managed land parcel.

Other Sections

A section of peasants, in the face of brutal oppression by landlords and due to hatred towards them, form rebel gangs and resort to killings of landlords and take to banditry and extortion. They are brave fighters but destructive in their approach. Through patient education and correct handling over a long period of time, the majority of them can be transformed into revolutionary forces. There are also those who do not engage in any productive activity, indulge in hooliganism, become easy prey of reactionaries and are even used as their goons and gun-men; these can be defined as the rural lumpen proletariat. There are also vagabonds in the countryside who do not engage in any productive work.

Apart from these broader classifications, there are many typical cases in different regions of India. Party organisations and peasant associations in their areas shall have to investigate these cases and educate their cadres in making class analysis correctly.

A vast majority of the people in our country, due to caste prejudices and other factors, do not plough themselves and resort to hiring labour; but their standard of living is akin to that of poor or middle peasants or in some cases to that of rich peasants. In such cases, differentiation should be made between persons taking part in any of the primary labour processes in agriculture, viz., sowing, ploughing, harvesting and threshing etc., those taking part in secondary labour and those not taking part in any labour at all. Keeping in mind these differentiations, their standard of living and their political and social attitude, they may be classified as poor, middle or rich peasants. Some of them may as well be termed as reactionaries and others as middle classes, taking into account their political leanings and cultural level.

There are also typical cases like a family of three persons — one selling his/her labour power, another engaging in self-cultivation and the third in some profession. Such cases should be decided on the basis of merits of each of them and characterisation of both the family as a whole and the individual members will have to be done separately, the individual positions being primarily taken into account.

Class Line of the Party of the Proletariat in Agrarian Revolution

To make the agrarian revolution successful, the party of the proletariat must, on the basis of this analysis of classes, follow the class line developed by Mao in the course of the Chinese revolution, “Rely on poor peasants, unite with the middle peasants, restrict the rich peasants and eliminate the landlords”.

In real life, the classes however do not exist as pure or ideal categories and are influenced by a host of other factors related to their social existence and hence in the course of implementation of this class line we must be prepared to face lots of complexities. For example, while middle peasants constitute a firm ally of the proletariat in the revolution, they keep oscillating between the landlords and proletariat because of their objective class position where they suffer at the hands of kulaks/landlords and at the same time have objective economic dependence on them. A large section of this class with a dual character gravitates towards the rural proletariat but a small section is oriented towards the peasant bourgeoisie and this is also rooted in the objective reality of differentiation. They are also wary of the wage demands of the rural proletariat.

The caste factor too often complicates the middle peasant question. In Bihar, sections of middle peasants have often been seen to come under the sway of the phenomenon of caste-based private armies led by landlords or kulaks of their respective castes. It takes a protracted struggle combining various forms to weaken and overcome such private armies and neutralize the hostility of peasants who are misled in the name of caste loyalty. With the rise of powerful regional parties identified with specific caste equations, middle peasants of concerned castes tend to follow the bourgeois-kulak leadership of such caste-based parties for a long time before getting disillusioned under the pressure of objective developments. This means we must be very patient and persistent in handling the middle peasant question and remain prepared for all sorts of twists and turns.

Like middle peasants, the question of rich peasants too merits careful analysis and attention. Under conditions of capitalist development in agriculture, a large section of the rich peasantry, which engages in direct cultivation and earns its surplus primarily through hired labour though expending a part of the own family labour, emerges as the peasant bourgeoisie/agrarian bourgeoisie/kulaks. As such the rural poor are usually locked in serious conflict with this class. Yet, in a situation of acute agrarian crisis a large section of this class also suffers despite a small section making significant gains from the policies of liberalization and globalization. Hence, rich peasants also have to embark on the path of direct struggles against the governments to varying extents on different issues. Wherever they join the path of direct struggle and to the extent they are willing to advance along this path, we can adopt a positive attitude towards these struggles. But such issue-based cooperation or unity must not be confused as an alliance with rich peasants as a class. Struggle with them would remain fundamental and our support to them against the policies of the state or the dictates of the WTO regime or the offensive of MNCs or Indian corporates should in no way weaken the direct class struggle of the rural proletariat against this class.

IV. Basic Programme and Immediate Tasks

The peasantry in India is suffering from what Lenin called the twin yokes of landlordism and capital. Only an agrarian revolution that both sweeps away landlordism and puts an end to the domination of capital can liberate the peasantry. This alone can be the foundation of democratic revolution in India. This agrarian programme of ours is geared to fulfil that historic necessity. Many bourgeois ideologues, and even some Left spokespersons, have started arguing that there is no more scope for land reforms. Any further push to land reforms and land redistribution would only give marginal results, they argue. Instead, they favour lifting of ceiling limits and tenancy restrictions to enable “development of viable holdings”, and their “consolidation” through market forces. The World Bank, on the other hand, acknowledges land reforms merely as an anti-poverty measure but pushes for its implementation not by a thorough take over of ceiling-surplus and benami land but advocates land reforms through market forces, through setting up corporations to lend money to the landless to purchase land from willing landowners coming forward to sell their land. As Marx cautioned, the landed property has become so sacrosanct that it should not be violated but any amount of land can be grabbed from peasants for corporates!

Today the inter-relationship between the fight against landlordism and the struggle against capital is such that one cannot be successfully carried out in isolation from the other. This is precisely because the big landed gentry have become the main collaborators of big capital and vehicles for their penetration into agriculture. This is a new corporate zamindari and the new landlords are zamindars of Reliance and Bharati, Tatas and Wal-Marts, Monsantos and Cargills. This is also the objectively strengthened class base for the unity of agrarian proletariat and the broad peasantry in the new conditions.

The path of freest and broad-based development of capitalism — the path of democracy — is possible only by basing on the mass of impoverished peasantry, who at present absolutely lack capital resources and challenging head on the agrarian strategy of the bourgeoisie and its state. The rural proletariat can and must take the lead in this struggle forging firm unity with the broad mass of poor and middle peasants.

Basic Programme

1. 1. All lands of the landlords and the public lands under their control shall be confiscated and distributed among the rural poor (agricultural labourers and poor peasantry) and the lower rungs of the toiling peasantry;
   2. The distribution will be on per capita basis and the rural poor will be provided with necessary assistance to cultivate the land preferably on a suitable collective basis;
   3. All agricultural implements, livestock, buildings, irrigation resources and assets of the landlords shall be confiscated and taken possession of by the People’s Government, for either distribution among the rural poor and the peasantry or allotted to them for their common use;
   4. After confiscation of land and assets, the landlords who do not play a reactionary role and the dependents of the reactionary landlords will be allotted land to carry on their living on the same basis as applicable to the peasants;
   5. The leased-out portion of the rich peasants’ land will be confiscated and the semi-feudal aspects of their exploitation will be abolished. They will however enjoy their rights over their self-cultivated lands;
   6. No portion of the lands of middle peasants, including well-to-do middle peasants, will be touched. Lower middle peasants will be allotted some land;
   7. Artisans and people of other professions in the rural areas, who wish to engage in cultivation, will also be allotted land
2. All loans and interests of usurious moneylenders and landlords and all debts of toiling peasants owed to the state will be cancelled. The state will facilitate rescheduling and repayment of loans taken from any other source.
3. Village revolutionary committees composed of farm labourers and poor and middle peasants will have the authority to supervise the task of implementing thoroughgoing land reforms and ensuring abolition of the survivals of feudalism;
4. The revolutionary government will, with the active cooperation of various mass organisations of the peasantry, organise production and help peasants in developing various forms of mutual aid, including producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives;
5. All amenities and institutions catering to various needs of the people shall be freed from the control of the erstwhile landlords and other dominant classes and strata and run by people’s committees;
6. Rural workers will be guaranteed —
   1. fair wages with 8 hours work day;
   2. right to get employment;
   3. equal rights and wages for men and women and special provisions for women workers; and
   4. social security
7. 1. The livelihood of weavers and other artisans and petty producers will be guaranteed and there will be gradual modernisation and mechanisation of their production process.
   2. Fisherfolks will enjoy full fishing rights and ownership over their produce; their exploitation by moneylenders and big traders will be done away with;
8. Indigenous people and other forest dwellers will own the cultivable land in the forests; non-tribal kulaks and landlords who have occupied tribal land will be evicted and any dispute between non-tribal poor peasants cultivating any land that orginially belonged to the indigenous people will be settled amicably; the rights of indigenous people over the forest produce will be restored and the forest policy and forest department will be suitably reoriented to put an end to the exploitation and oppression of adivasi peasants by forest officials; indigenous people engaged in jhum (shifting) cultivation will be encouraged and enabled to switch over to settled agriculture and systematically develop their productive forces;
9. Large farms of big capitalist landlords, depending upon the conditions, may either be dismantled and the land distributed among the peasants or transferred as collective property to the farm labourers;
1. Mechanised big farms of the comprador bourgeoisie and all state farms will be nationalised by the people’s government and developed as large-scale model farms, and
2. Plantations of small and medium capitalists and farms of capitalist farmers will not be confiscate.

Immediate Tasks

1. Seizure of surplus land above the ceiling limit, benami land, land held under illegitimate occupation of religious trusts and places of worship, and other such properties held by landlords, the lands of poor and middle peasants illegally captured by landlords, and government land; distribution of these among poor peasants and agrarian labourers. Efforts should be made to concentrate the struggle against big landlords and die-hard anti-people anti-poor elements among rich peasants, and in no case should there be any encroachment on the land of the middle peasants;
2. Given the pitiable record of land reforms in India and the obvious lack of political will in this regard the most effective means to achieve the above tasks is nationalization of land, i.e., vesting all land with the state to be leased out to actual tillers for individual, and wherever possible, collective cultivation. This demand may therefore be popularized at the appropriate level after taking into consideration various objective and subjective conditions;
3. Opposition to all forms of landgrab by corporate houses and real estate and land mafia; scrapping of the Special Economic Zone Act, 2005 and Land Acquisition Act of 1894;
4. Seizure of crops illegally held, and grains hoarded, by landlords to feed the starving rural poor; and fight against pilferage of subsidised foodgrains and for extension of the public distribution system to cover all sections of the rural poor;
5. Fight against eviction of tenants and for reduction of rent and interest, and for the rights of sharecroppers. Fight for reduction of water tax and any other tax burden on the peasantry;
6. Fight against confiscation of peasants’ land and attachment of their properties and auction of these by the reactionary government in the event of the peasants’ failure to repay bank and other government loans, and fight for reduction of interest on bank and cooperative loans; fight for ban on usury;
7. Fight for abolition of bonded labour and child labour, fight against forced labour service and all other forms of extra-economic coercion in labour relations, and fight for increased wages and working conditions for agrarian labourers. Take up movements on their problems of drinking water and housing, health and education;
8. Support the struggles of peasants against big merchants, bureaucrat-capitalists, and imperialists for remunerative prices for their produce and fight for subsidised inputs for poor and middle peasants to be provided by the state; fight for a market stabilisation fund and agricultural tariff regulation commission with majority representation from peasant associations;
9. Oppose the plunder of forest wealth by the timber mafia, contractors, landlords, imperialists and bureaucrat-capitalists and government officials and fight for the proper restoration of the traditional rights of adivasis and other concerned sections of the people over forest wealth. Fight for the distribution of government land and cultivable forest land among adivasis and other forest dwellers and for pattas over their land;
10. Fight against the exploitation of fishermen by the owners of mechanised boats, trawlers, big traders and moneylenders and for a ban on foreign companies and vessels from fishing in Indian waters;
11. Fight against neo-liberal policies and the WTO regime, against various reactionary bills like Seed Bill 2004, and bills and acts on rollback of land reforms legislations, fight for a comprehensive legislation for agricultural labourers and for lowering of land ceilings and for proper implementation of acts like the Tribal Act 2006 and NREGA;
12. Fight for distribution of various government relief measures among the people through peasant and agricultural labour associations and not through corrupt government officials;
13. Raise the slogan that government officials be elected by and held accountable to the people. Fight for formation of land committees comprising agricultural labourers, poor peasants and middle peasants which will supervise the work of land reform;
14. Oppose atrocities on dalits, adivasis, Muslims, Christians and other minority communities and weaker sections of the society by casteist and communal forces and the police and security forces of the state; take up various positive programmes for developing the unity of the people of different castes and religions; work among the upper castes, promoting social reform to free their vast majority from feudal bias;
15. Develop such organisations of the people as “village self-defence corps”, “volunteer forces”, and “resistance squads of women” etc., to enable them to defend themselves from the attacks of the feudal forces, the police and goondas.

As conditions vary in different states and in different regions in the same state, agricultural labour and peasant organisations should take up particular demands according to the concrete conditions of their areas. While fighting for immediate demands, emphasis should always be placed on mobilising the masses in ever greater numbers and on raising their level of consciousness.

The Basic Programme cannot be implemented overnight and it is imperative to take up the immediate demands for the step-by-step mobilisation and organisation of the masses. But we must not lose sight of the basic programme while taking up immediate tasks. On the one hand, the Basic Programme and the Immediate Tasks are distinct categories which should not be confused; on the other, they are intimately linked up. If this orientation is lost, we will either be practising left opportunism or sheer economism.

Conclusion

Instead of liberating the productive forces, the reactionary and reformist solutions of the ruling classes have intensified all the contradiction in our society and aggravated the agrarian crisis. The imperialist onslaughts have also intensified. Class conflicts are becoming more and more intensified. The more the situation becomes complex and challenging, the greater becomes the necessity of clear and firm orientation and the role of the vanguard of the proletariat assumes greater importance.

Boldly rouse the tens of millions agricultural labourers and peasants – this is the call of the situation. The vanguard of the proletariat must make the utmost sacrifice and display the greatest heroism. They must develop the initiative, determination and boldness of the broad peasant masses and agricultural labourers, and organize them throughout the country.

Indian peasants have fought heroically against feudalism and imperialism; hundreds and thousands of their finest sons and daughters have laid down their lives. The struggle for land, liberty and liberation continues, and the party of the revolutionary proletariat must lead it to its ultimate victory. Let us prepare ourselves to march at the head of the oncoming great upsurge of the rural poor.

Annexure-I

A. Leninist Understanding on the Two Paths of Capitalist Development in Agriculture

Development of capitalism in backward agriculture burdened with feudal survivals — as in pre-revolutionary Russia and present-day India — can proceed in two different ways. Following Lenin, Marxists call these Prussian/landlord path and American/peasant path. In a number of writings Lenin discussed the basic features and implications of these two contradictory ways and explained why the party of the proletariat must support and work for the latter course as against the former. In “The New Agrarian Policy” he gives us perhaps the most simple and concise definition of the two paths:

“The old agrarian system in Russia… can be broken up in the landlord way or the peasant way, to clear the path for landlord or peasant capitalism. The landlord way of breaking up the old order involves the forcible destruction of the village commune and the accelerated ruination and extermination of the mass of impoverished owners for the benefit of a handful of kulaks. The peasant way involves the confiscation of the landlords’ land, and the transfer of all the land to free proprietors from among the peasantry.” (Lenin’s Collected Works, (henceforth LCW) Volume 13, p 457)

The following passages from “The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution, 1905-1907”— where we have inserted a few explanatory terms in square brackets — explain the issues involved in greater detail:

“The development of commodity production and capitalism will certainly and inevitably put an end to those survivals [of serfdom]. In that respect Russia has only one path before her, that of bourgeois development.

But there may be two forms of that development. The survivals of serfdom may fall away either as a result of the transformation of landlord economy or as a result of the abolition of the landlord latifundia, i. e., either by reform or by revolution. Bourgeois development may proceed by having big landlord economies at the head, which will gradually become more and more bourgeois and gradually substitute bourgeois for feudal methods of exploitation. It may also proceed by having small peasant economies at the head, which in a revolutionary way, will remove the “excrescence” of the feudal latifundia from the social organism and then freely develop without them along the path of capitalist economy.

Those two paths of objectively possible bourgeois development we would call the Prussian path and the American path, respectively. In the first case feudal landlord economy slowly evolves into bourgeois, Junker landlord economy, which condemns the peasants to decades of most harrowing expropriation and bondage, while at the same time a small minority of Grossbauern (“big peasants”) arises. In the second case there is no landlord economy, or else it is broken up by revolution, which confiscates and splits up the feudal estates. In that case the peasant predominates, becomes the sole agent of agriculture, and evolves into a capitalist farmer. In the first case the main content of the evolution is transformation of feudal bondage into servitude and capitalist exploitation on the land of the feudal landlords—Junkers. In the second case the main background is transformation of the patriarchal peasant into a bourgeois farmer.

In the economic history of Russia both these types of evolution are clearly in evidence. Take the epoch of the fall of serfdom. A struggle went on between the landlords and the peasants over the method of carrying out the reform.   Both stood for conditions of bourgeois economic development (without being aware of it), but the former wanted a development that would preserve to the utmost the landlord economies, the landlord revenues, and the landlord (bondage) methods of exploitation. The latter wanted a development that would secure for the peasants the greatest degree of prosperity possible with the existing level of agriculture, the abolition of the landlord latifundia, the abolition of all serf and bondage methods of exploitation, and the expansion of free peasant landownership. Needless to say, in the second case the development of capitalism and the growth of the productive forces would have been wider and more rapid than by peasant reform, carried out in the landlords’ way….

Landlord economy evolves in a capitalist way and gradually replaces the labour rent system by “free wage-labour”, the three-field system by intensive cultivation, and the obsolete peasant implements by the improved machinery employed on the big private farms. Peasant farming also evolves in a capitalist way and gives rise to a rural bourgeoisie and a rural proletariat. The better the condition of the “village commune” and the greater the prosperity of the peasantry in general, the more rapid is the process of differentiation among the peasantry into the antagonistic   classes of capitalist agriculture. Consequently, we see two streams of agrarian evolution everywhere. The conflict of interests between the peasants and the landlords which runs like a scarlet thread through the whole history of post-Reform Russia and constitutes the most important economic basis of our revolution, is a struggle for one or the other type of bourgeois agrarian evolution.

Only by clearly understanding the difference between these two types and the bourgeois character of both, can we correctly explain the agrarian question in the Russian revolution and grasp the class significance of the various agrarian programmes put forward by the different parties. …

Let us take the Stolypin programme, which is supported by the Right landlords and the Octobrists. It is avowedly a landlords’ programme. But… [it] is permeated through and through with the purely bourgeois spirit. There can be no doubt that it follows the line of capitalist evolution… Without a doubt, that legislation is progressive in the scientific-economic sense.

But does that mean that Social-Democrats should “support” it? It does not. Only vulgar Marxism can reason in that way, a Marxism whose seeds Plekhanov and the Mensheviks are so persistently sowing when they sing, shout, plead, and proclaim: we must support the bourgeoisie in its struggle against the old order of things. No. To facilitate the development of the productive forces (this highest criterion of social progress) we must support not bourgeois evolution of the landlord type, but bourgeois evolution of the peasant type. The former implies the utmost preservation of bondage and serfdom (remodelled on bourgeois lines), the least rapid development of the productive forces, and the retarded development of capitalism; it implies infinitely greater misery and suffering, exploitation and oppression for the broad mass of the peasantry and, consequently, also for the proletariat. The second type implies the most rapid development of the productive forces and   the best possible (under commodity production) conditions of existence for the mass of the peasantry. The tactics of Social-Democracy in the Russian bourgeois revolution are determined not by the task of supporting the liberal bourgeoisie, as the opportunists think, but by the task of supporting the fighting peasantry.” (LCW, Volume 13, pp 239-44)

B. Marxist Attitude to Agrarian Crisis

The present crisis of Indian agriculture should be seen in the context of crisis of capitalist transition in Indian agriculture. But the crisis as a whole cannot be equated to, or described merely as, a crisis of capitalism in agriculture. It is a comprehensive, multi-faceted crisis – encompassing all strata of peasantry, agricultural labourers, even a section of kulaks, prices, inputs, production and yield, demand, and even has a strong ecological dimension.

i) Agrarian Crisis and Agrarian Techniques:

Pointing to the general backwardness of agriculture in India, bourgeois ideologues misinterpret this manifestation of the crisis – viz., the inability to modernize – as the cause of the crisis and simplemindedly keep advising the farmers to modernize and switch over to high-value, modern agriculture. Lenin had dealt with a similar viewpoint in Russia and this is how he had exposed the fallacy: “What is the essence of this crisis? M. Shanin, in his pamphlet Municipalisation or Division for Private Property (Vilna, 1907), insists that our agrarian crisis is a crisis of agricultural methods, and that its root cause lies in the need for raising the technique of agriculture, which is incredibly low in Russia, in the need for changing over to more efficient methods of arable farming, etc.

“This opinion is wrong, because it is too abstract. Undoubtedly, a change over to higher technique is necessary, but, in the first place, this transition has actually been going on in Russia since 1861. However slow the progress, it is beyond all doubt that both landlord farming and peasant farming … have been going over to the use of improved implements, to more systematic and careful manuring of the soil, etc. And since this slow progress in agricultural technique has been a general process since 1861, it is obvious that it is not enough to quote it as an explanation of the universally admitted intensification of the agricultural crisis at the end of the nineteenth century. Secondly, both forms of “solution” of the agrarian question that have been advanced in practice – both the Stolypin solution from above, … and also the peasant (Trudovik) solution from below … – both these solutions, each in its own way, facilitate the transition to a higher technique and promote agricultural progress. The only difference is that one solution bases this progress on accelerating the process of forcing the poor peasants out of agriculture, while the other bases it on accelerating the process of eliminating labour service by abolishing the feudalist latifundia. …

“Consequently, in the agrarian question and the agrarian crisis the heart of the matter is not simply the removal of obstacles to the advance of agricultural technique, but what way these obstacles are to be removed, what class is to effect this removal and by what methods” (LCW, Volume 15, pp 135-36)

ii) Agrarian Crisis and Differentiation of the Peasantry:

Should the agrarian crisis be viewed as a process of common ruin that levels differences within the peasantry? Or should we keep the differentiation in mind while studying the differential impact of the crisis on different segments of the agricultural population? In the article cited above (The Agrarian Question in Russia towards the Close of the Nineteenth Century, LCW, Vol. 15, pp 69-147) Lenin underscores the fact that the differentiation does not diminish, let alone disappear, in the wake of intensification of the agrarian crisis, but proceeds through the crisis: “The peasantry became poorer, the well-to-do groups became poorer, the crisis of 1891 made itself felt very seriously, but the relationship between the rural bourgeoisie and the peasantry that was being driven to ruin did not change as a result, nor could they change essentially” (LCW, Vol. 15, p 128).

During the so-called “Mode of Production Debate” in the past and also subsequently, several academics have shown surprise at the relatively slow pace of differentiation among peasantry despite large-scale penetration of capital into Indian agriculture and some even tended to characterise it as some kind of unique capitalist transition in agriculture with regulated differentiation because of the role of the state and price control regime. But capitalist transition in agriculture without differentiation of the peasantry would be an absurdity, whether the transition is effected along the landlord path or the peasant path. The internal and external liberalisation have speeded up the process of differentiation and the heavy indebtedness of a large chunk of peasantry, many of them losing their land as a result and a new kind of land concentration, including through reverse tenancy – all are symptoms, as well as the process of this differentiation, and this pace of differentiation can only grow as the state seeks to speed up the disruption of small peasant agriculture.

iii)Marxism and Defence of Small-scale Farming

Some bourgeois ideologues try to rationalize the crisis and destruction of small peasants under the present agrarian crisis as historically inevitable and criticize leftists’ defense of small peasantry as some kind of revival of “neo populism”. Is the support of Marxists to the small peasantry and small-scale farming historically reactionary? No. In the face of onslaught from semi-feudal landlordism and big capital, it is the duty of Marxists to defend them and champion their interests. Citing Marx and Engels, Lenin time and again defended small-scale farming against large-scale feudal economy. He stressed that “... support of petty-proprietorship in agriculture may be the duty of Marxists, and must be their duty wherever petty-bourgeois economy is economically progressive compared with large-scale feudal economy,” and further clarified that “The renovation of small farming is possible even under capitalism if the historical aim is to fight a pre-capitalist order” (LCW, Vol.13, p. 292).

The historical transformation of small peasantry under communists shall take a different course. In this regard, Lenin quotes Engels: “… when we are in possession of state power we shall not even think of directly expropriating the small peasants, as we shall have to do in the case of big landowners. Our task relative to the small peasant consists, in the first place, in effecting a transition of his private enterprise and private possession to cooperative ones, not forcibly but by dint of example and the proffer of social assistance for this purpose.” (LCW, Vol 19, p. 74)

Even from the “purely economic” perspective, Marxists have nothing against small farms. It has been established by several studies that in the Indian context too, the productivity of the small farm – land productivity, labour productivity as well as total factor productivity – is usually higher that that of the large farm. Given the right support and favourable market conditions, small farms also quickly adopt green revolution technology. The so-called crisis of viability and burden of indebtedness are not specific to small farms alone and these are due to reasons extraneous to farm size.

Even as the agrarian crisis invariably speeds up the differentiation of the peasantry and expropriation of small peasants, revisionists have brazenly begun to toe a pro-rich peasant line, even going to the extent of evicting peasants by forcible and fraudulent means and dishing out all the dubious arguments that seek to rationalize the expropriation of small peasants. The CPI(M) that always sought to project itself as an ardent champion of agrarian reforms is now desperately trying to push through reverse reforms in West Bengal – by rolling back both land ceiling and Operation Barga measures. The contrast between the revisionist and revolutionary approaches to the agrarian question thus stands out all the more glaringly as the crisis of the landlord path of capitalist development in agriculture escalates.

Annexure-II

Here is a statistical outline providing an overall view of conditions obtaining in the Indian agriculture and indicating various trends in the agricultural and rural economy.

(i) Population and Workforce:

According to the 2001 census figures, 53.2 per cent of India’s total population is engaged in agricultural and allied activities. In terms of employment, agriculture accounted for 58.2 per cent of the total workforce in the country (31.7 per cent cultivators and 26.5 per cent agricultural labourers).

Between 1991 and 2001, the number of cultivators increased by 1,466,949 (though the number of male cultivators declined by 4,241,306, the number of women cultivators increased by 5,708,255). The number of agricultural labourers increased by 21,339,328 (10,200,130 men and 11,139,198 women) in the same period. In other words, while the number of cultivators increased by 1.17 per cent (the number of male cultivators declined by 4.73 per cent but that of women cultivators increased by 16.30 per cent, an unusual increase which is being explained by more number of women taking to direct cultivation as their menfolk migrate away from low-income agriculture to non-farm activities locally or outside due to the agrarian crisis). The number of agricultural labourers increased by 24.85 per cent (the number of men by 21.72 per cent and the number of women by 28.64 per cent, the sharper increase for women labourers, too, confirming the same trend of “feminization” of agricultural labour also).

A word of caution on this phenomenon of “feminization” of agricultural workforce might be in order. Though the share of women has been going up in the workforce, in terms of overall worker-population ratio, the proportion of people employed to the total population, the percentage of people joining the workforce was 54 per cent for males in both rural and urban India. Among females, the corresponding WPR was 24 per cent in rural areas in principal status, and another 8 per cent having pursued some economic activity in a subsidiary capacity during the year. Thus the share of women coming into the workforce remains low. In rural areas, agriculture was the predominant employer with 71 per cent of male workers and 85 per cent of female workers engaged in farm activities.

(ii) Agricultural Growth:

Agricultural growth rates during 1980s and 1990s were lower than in the earlier decade. The green revolution had obviously run out of steam within a decade and half. A stronger confirmation of this comes from the fact that the slowing down of agricultural growth rate has been more marked in states that are highly irrigated, and which have shown high level of adoption of the new technology and which recorded very high growth rate in the past. Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Punjab and Madhya Pradesh have shown a sharp deceleration while Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala have shown negative growth.

The trend growth of foodgrain production was only 0.22% during 1996-2006. Per capita food production was 207 kgs in 1991-95 and it came down to 186 kgs in 2004-07. The production of cereals came down from 192 kgs to 174 kgs and pulses from 15 kgs to 12 kgs in this period. While rice production growth rate declined from 2.02% in the 1990s to –0.49% during 2000-05, wheat production growth rate has declined from 3.57% to 0.57%.

(iii) Structural Change:

The share of agriculture in our country’s GDP has come down to 18.5 per cent by 2006-07 from around 33 per cent in 1982 but the share of population dependent on agriculture still remain slightly less than 54 per cent of the total population of the country and around 73 per cent of the total rural population despite agriculture reducing to about half of the rural economy.

(iv) Rural Farm and Non-Farm:

As of 2000, agriculture accounted for just over half of rural economic activity, down from 64% in the early 1980s and 72% in 1971. Services, on the other hand, now account for 28% of rural activity, up from 21% in 1981, while manufacturing, utilities and construction have nearly doubled their share in the rural economy to 18% in 2000 from just under 10% in 1971.

In fact, contrary to very slow agricultural growth, India’s rural economy as a whole has grown on average by 7.3% year-over-year over the past decade, against 5.4% in the urban sector. But the growth of the rural non-farm economy has slackened of late as a result of the agrarian stagnation. Some calculations using the latest Central Statistic Organization figures suggest that the total rural economy, including the rural non-farm, accounted for 51% of India’s national domestic product in 2005-06, up from 49% in 2000 and 46% in 1993-94.

Contrary to the relative decline of agriculture in the rural economy, the shift in the ratio of agricultural and non-agricultural population in the rural areas has not been so marked. In 2004, 72.4 per cent of rural people were engaged in agricultural activities and 27.6 in non-agriculture. But there is unevenness among states in this regard also: Chhattisgarh (90.9 per cent), Uttarakhand (84.6), Madhya Pradesh (82.5), Bihar (80.1), Maharashtra (78.7), Gujarat (76.6), Uttar Pradesh (75.1), and Rajasthan (72.6) had a relatively higher share of rural people engaged in agricultural activities whereas Kerala (59.7), West Bengal (39.6), Punjab (38.8), and Tamil Nadu (36.1) had a higher share of rural population engaged in non-agricultural activities.

(v) Land Use and Cropping Patterns:

The Net Sown Area was 140.27 million hectares (mha) in 1970-71, 143 mha in 1990-91 and it came down to 132.86 mha in 2002-03, an exceptionally severe drought year, and it was 140.88 mha in 2003-04. The Total Cropped Area was 172.63 mha in 1980-81, 186.74 mha in 1990-91, 190.24 mha in 2001-02 but it came down to 175.65 mha in 2002-03 due to the severe drought that year but recovered to 190.84 the next year. This means that the area sown more than once has been around 47-48 mha in recent times and the cropping intensity only around 1.30 to 1.35. This includes a fairly high degree of regional variation - while the cropping intensity is 1.80 in Punjab and 1.65 in West Bengal, it is only 1.13 in Gujarat, 1.21 in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, and 1.24 in Maharashra and Madhya Pradesh.

In 2002-03, the Culturable Wasteland was 13.49 mha. Current Fallows (defined as cultivated the previous year but not cultivated that year) was 21.63 mha and Other Fallows (other than the current fallows, defined as cultivated sometime during the past five years but not cultivated that year) was 11.68 mha. Pressures on both land and water resources have been increasing but the scope for addition to net cropped area is not large.

The area under HYV crops was 15.38 mha in 1970-71, 43.08 mha in 1980-81, 64.98 mha in 1990-91 and 78.35 mha in 1997-98. Strangely, while the HYV area witnessed a five-fold increase between 1970-71 and 1997-98, the total foodgrains production only doubled during this period, indicating that increase in HYV cultivation doesn’t increase production at the same rate in the post-green revolution period.

The ratio of agricultural land to agricultural population declined from 0.34 hectare/person in 1991 to 0.31 hectare/person in 2001.

In terms of cropping pattern, in 2000-01, the percentage share of different crops in the total cultivated areas was: paddy 23.88, wheat 14.50, coarse cereals 16.49, total cereals 54.13, pulses 11.33, total foodgrains 65.96, sugarcane 2.44, total fruits 1.88, total vegetables 2.51, total oil seeds 13.46, cotton 4.67, jute and mesta 0.56, and tobacco 0.18.

(vi) Irrigation:

Irrigated land as percentage of total agricultural (cultivable) land was 28 per cent in 1991 and it was 32.3 per cent in 2001. Net Irrigated Area was 54.68 million hectare. The Gross Irrigated Area was 75.14 million hectare or the area irrigated for more than one season was 20.46 million hectare. Irrigated land formed 42% of net sown area during the kharif season and 67% during the rabi season of 2002-03.

Regional unevenness in irrigation is high. Only 7 per cent of Vidarbha is irrigated whereas 63 per cent of the western Maharashtra, dominated by the sugarcane lobby of kulaks backing Pawar, is irrigated. In Andhra Pradesh, bulk of Godavari districts are irrigated but not the Telengana region through which the river passes to the Godavari districts.

Irrigation development has virtually come to a standstill during the liberalisation period and this irrigation crisis is a major underlying factor behind the agrarian crisis. While the growth of major and medium irrigation works has not changed much (around 0.5 million hectares have been added each year during the Eighth and Ninth Plans), there has been a dramatic fall in the growth of minor irrigation from around 1.6 million hectares a year during the Seventh Plan to 1.1 in the Eighth and 0.1 in the Ninth Plan. Expansion of private minor irrigation by borewell/well irrigation by farmers has been offset by the decline in the irrigation potential of minor waterbodies and sources of irrigation.

The government launched the watershed development programme with much fanfare. The government claims to have treated, in the IX Plan, around 12.7 million hectares of rain-fed area with Rs. 3560 crore which works out to just around Rs. 28 crore per one lakh hectares, or a little over Rs. 1,100 per acre! No wonder this scheme became a flop.

(vii) Inputs Use:

Inputs use is highly uneven in Indian agriculture. For instance, fertiliser use (kgs/hectare) in some states are: Punjab 299.5, Haryana 202.5, Andhra Pradesh 158.9, Bihar 93.5, Kerala 90.5, Karnataka 90.2, Gujarat 81.1, Maharashtra 76.6, Madhya Pradesh 42.2, Rajasthan 39.2, Orissa 37.7 and Assam 18.2.

(viii) Mechanisation:

In 2005-06, for above 12.6 crore farming households (2001 Census), there were 1.81 lakh power tillers, 55,000 combine harvesters, 12.514 million electric pumps and 7.432 million diesel pumps and in 2000-01, there were 2.21 crore threshers, 21.33 sugarcane crushers, and 3.11 lakh power sprayers.

In 1960-61, before the onset of green revolution, there were only 30,000 tractors for agricultural use in India and the number increased to 90,000 in 1970-71, 4,28,000 in 1980-81, 12.44 lakh in 1990-91, 17.34 lakh in 1995-96, 25.99 lakh in 2000-01, 38.19 lakhs in 2005-06. Though looking like a phenomenal growth, this means still only around 3 per cent of the farming households possess tractors. In 1966-67, 40.82 million pairs of draught animals were being used for ploughing in India and, in 1995-96, 32.38 million were still being used.

According to the 59th Round NSSO (2003) survey on “Aspects of Farming”, at the all-India level 52 per cent of farming households still use animal power for ploughing. Tractor ploughing percentage is more than 50 per cent in Punjab (96), Haryana (89), Uttar Pradesh (81), Kerala (72), Rajasthan (70), Tamil Nadu (68), Bihar (64) and West Bengal (53), but it is relatively less in Andhra Pradesh (38), Madhya Pradesh (34), significantly low in Maharashtra (21), Karnataka (14), Orissa (12), Chhattisgarh (10) and abysmally low in Assam (3) and Jharkhand (2).

(ix) Marketed Surplus:

The marketed surplus ratio of total foodgrains in India in 2001-02 was 73.6. A higher marketed surplus and greater degree of commodification of output however does not by itself signify a higher degree of capitalist penetration as a large number of peasants sell their produce in the market only to meet their consumption needs and make very little additional reinvestment.

(x) Agricultural Imports and Exports:

Between 1996-97 and 2003-04 agricultural imports into India have increased by a whopping 375 per cent in volume and 300 per cent in value terms. It is important to note that the value of imports as proportion to agricultural GDP has also increased from less than three per cent to 4.34 per cent during the same period. Between 1998 and 2000-01, the average annual import of farm products rose by about 64 per cent, while exports declined by 7 per cent. Only after 2000-01 the trend got reversed somewhat and exports revived. But while the NDA Government exported wheat at prices lower than the domestic BPL prices, the UPA Government again resorted to massive wheat imports at rates double than what it paid to domestic farmers.

(xi) Coverage of Crop Insurance:

Hardly 10 per cent of the farmers are covered by crop insurance. The Agricultural Insurance Company, a newly launched subsidiary of the General Insurance Corporation had covered 1.24 crore farmers under its crop insurance scheme till 2003-04 since its inception in 1999-2000. The National Agricultural Insurance Scheme – operated also by other insurance companies – had covered 4.62 crore farmers but had paid Rs. 4,777 crore as claims to 1.5 crore “farmers” – most of which are bogus and manipulated by the ruling party politicians and brokers – which is much more than the premium (in some places the premium to claims ratio is 1:4) and hence the scheme is in doldrums. More than 90 per cent of the farmers covered are loanee farmers forced to pay compulsory premium while taking bank loans. On the other hand, tens of thousands of farmers, who could not pay their premium in time because of the agrarian crisis, have been ousted from this scheme and hundreds of crores of premium they had already paid had been forfeited.

(xii) Public Investment in Agriculture and Rural Development:

Rural Development expenditure, in 1989, was 14.5 per cent of our GDP. It had sunk to 5.9 per cent of the GDP by 2004. In concrete terms, it represents a (notional) fall of about Rs 30,000 crore a year in rural expenditure.

Agriculture is a state subject but the total plan outlay by 28 states during five years of X Plan on agriculture and allied activities was a paltry amount of Rs. 7,179 crore only and it accounted for just 5 per cent of their total plan outlay. As many as 16 states witnessed an absolute decline. The share of rural development was around 9 per cent and irrigation and flood control was around 18 per cent.

The underdevelopment in rural areas is such that, according to a report by the NCAER on rural infrastructure, on the average 89 percent of rural households do not own telephones, 52 percent of households do not have domestic power connections. The average brownout in India is 3 hours in non-monsoon months and 17 hours in monsoon months; 20 percent of rural habitations have partial or no access to safe drinking water supply; 2 Km is the average distance from a village to an all weather road and 52 percent of people living in habitations away from the main village do not have access to all weather roads. Different studies of the Planning Commission have estimated that to provide minimum infrastructure to the villages an amount of Rs. 1,58,313 crore (in 2002-03 prices) would be required – Telecom Rs. 92,690 crore, Power Rs. 55,243 crore, Roads Rs. 5,892 crore, and Water/Sanitation Rs. 4,488 crore. This is just almost equal to tax concessions given to industry in a single year and yet successive governments find this amount totally unmanageable.

(xiii) Capital Formation:

Capital formation in agriculture has been declining as a share of total GDP as well as a share of agricultural GDP. Within overall capital formation, the relative share of public sector has been sharply declining and the share of private capital formation has been increasing but not to the extent of offsetting the decline in public sector capital formation in agriculture. The total capital formation in agriculture in 1999-2000 was Rs. 21388 crore and Rs. 19451 crore in 2000-01. According to the CSO National Accounts Statistics figures, the total capital formation in agriculture (in 1980-81 constant prices), the capital formation in public sector and private sector in 1990-91 were: Rs. 14836 crore, Rs. 4396 crore, and Rs. 10441 crore and in 2000-01 the figures for the same heads were Rs. 16906 crore, Rs. 3927 crore, and Rs. 12979 crore and they recovered somewhat to Rs. 20510 crore, Rs. 5249 crore, and Rs. 15261 in 2003-04. The Gross Capital formation in agriculture (GCF) as percentage of the total GDP and as percentage of agricultural GDP were: 3.8 and 9.9 in 1980-81, 1.92 and 6.6 in 1990-91, 1.28 and 5.9 in 2000-01 and 1.31 and 6.0 in 2003-04. The composition of the shares of public and private agricultural GCF in terms of percentages were: 50.6 and 49.4 in 1980-81, 29.6 and 70.4 in 1990-91, 23.2 and 76.8 in 2000-01 and 25.6 and 74.4 in 2003-04.

The annual growth rate of Gross Capital Formation in Agriculture (GCFA) was 6.48 per cent in the 1960s, 6.06 per cent in the 1970s, –0.96 per cent in the 1980s and 2.05 per cent in the 1990s. The GCFA as percentage of aggregate capital formation in the economy was: 13.5 per cent in the 1960s, 13.6 per cent in the 1970s, 10.7 per cent in the 1980s and 6.9 per cent in the 1990s. The GCFA as percentage of agricultural GDP was: 6.1 per cent in the 1960s, 7.4 per cent in the 1970s, 7.5 per cent in the 1980s and 6.2 per cent in the 1990s.

The CSO GCF in agriculture (narrow series) data has serious limitations as they mainly cover investment in irrigation but do not include investments in rural electrification, and in the development of rural roads, markets and storage facilities and so on. Some academics have expanded the CSO data by including a broader range of 23 heads and these broader data also show more or less the same trends mentioned above in the CSO data. Several studies have established the positive relation of public investment to private investment and, though private investment in agriculture had increased in absolute terms, the increase would have been much more if the share of public investment had not declined sharply. The share of GCFA in the total gross Capital Formation in the economy had halved during 1960-61 to 1998-99.

The efficiency of capital use has also been on the decline. As calculated by the noted agricultural economist Ramesh Chand, the Incremental Capital-Output Ratio (ICOR) in agriculture was 6.52 during 1974-75 to 1978-79, 4.05 during 1980-81 to 1984-85, 2.82 during 1985-86 to 1989-90 and 3.44 during 1990-91 to 1994-96. The ICOR was the lowest in West Bengal during 1992-97 and hence no wonder that the “high growth” story came to an end in this period in west Bengal agriculture. To achieve 4.5 per cent growth in agriculture, the investment in agriculture has to grow at 12 per cent per year instead of at 5 per cent now.

(xiv) Input and Output Prices:

The price of urea has gone up from Rs. 2,350 in 1996 to Rs. 3,680 per tonne in 1998 to Rs. 4,830 in 2002; the cost of DAP has risen from Rs. 8,300 per tonne in 1998 to Rs. 9,350 in 205-06; and NPK prices have risen from Rs. 7,500 per tonne to Rs. 8,060 in 2005-06. The price of phosphatic fertilisers has more than doubled during the peak liberalization period. In contrast, the output price for paddy never increased more than 4 per cent per annum since 2001-02 and the price of wheat more than 2 per cent on an average.

(xv) Indebtedness:

Between 1991-92 and 2003-04, according to the NSSO, the indebtedness of farmers doubled from 21 per cent to 48 per cent.
The average annual indebtedness of farming households according to the NSSO All-India Debt and Investment Survey 2002-03 was Rs. 31,182 and according to the NSSO Situation Assessment Survey was Rs. 25,895. And in Punjab, according to some reports, this figure is upto Rs. 45,000 per hectare in some regions – a classic case of debt trap.

Per household debt for agricultural labourers has increased by 80 per cent from Rs. 2901 to Rs. 5230 between Sixth Rural Labour Enquiry (1993-94) and Seventh RLE (1999-2000). One-fourth of the agricultural labourers still remained indebted in 1999-2000, the period when real wages rate growth was supposed to be high according to the official data.

(xvi) Subsidies:

In 2004-05, the US was giving a subsidy of $ 4.7 billion for its cotton crop worth $ 3.9 billion, produced by just 20000 farmers. The US Farm Bill 2007 proposes to increase it to $ 5.5 billion. By contrast, in India, total subsidies to agriculture were Rs. 39,046 crore in 2000-01 and Rs. 37,564 crore in 2003-04 and are expected to cross Rs. 80,000 crore because of the ballooning of fertiliser subsidy due to the steep hike in international gas prices. Experts however point out that only about half of the fertilizer subsidy reaches farmers while the rest is pocketed by the fertilizer industry. And rich farmers owning 10 acres and more grab 60-75 per cent of the total subsidy earmarked for farmers under different heads like water, power, fertilizer, low-interest credit and so on. Tenants, as a rule, do not get most of the subsidies and compensations for crop loss due to natural disasters and are even deprived of institutional credit for want of collateral.

(xvii) Poverty:

Impoverisation and immiserisation among the rural poor, including a large section of the peasantry, is taking place, not just despite high growth in the economy but precisely because of the structural reasons underlying the very nature of this growth and the agrarian crisis precipitated by that. The poverty reduction claims, based on manipulated methodology, of the government are bogus. The Approach Paper to the XI Plan of the Planning Commission exposed the falsity of the earlier figures of the Planning Commission itself in this regard. With the manipulated methodology of the Planning Commission, the government claimed a sharp reduction in poverty incidence in the country to 26 per cent in 1999-2000 and 24.4 per cent in 2000-01, but the NSSO 57th Round based on the same method showed that the number of people living below the poverty line went up to 27.6 per cent in 2001-02.

Over 33 million Indians were added to the ranks of the poor in 2001-02 alone. Rural areas saw a marked rise in poverty levels, as the percentage of people living below the poverty line went up from 24.4 per cent in 2000-01 to 28.6 per cent in 2001-02. In 2001-02, the monthly per capita consumption expenditure in rural areas rose by a mere 0.7 per cent over that in 2000-01. The results were “surprising” to the policymakers and planners because in 2001-02 the economy grew at 5.6 per cent and agriculture at 5.2 per cent. In fact, agricultural population accounted for 78.77 per cent of all poor in rural areas in 1987-88 and it remained almost static at 77.22 per cent in 1993-94 and also in 2004-05. Among the agricultural poor, casual labourers are the poorest lot.

In 2003, people with an average monthly per capita consumption expenditure (MPCE) below Rs 470, constituted 50 per cent of the rural population while 13 per cent had an MPCE below Rs 300. This means about half the rural population survives barely on Rs. 15 per head per day and around one-eighth survives on a measly amount of Rs. 10 a day.

Among all social and occupational group, incidence of poverty among agricultural labourers is very high, especially in some regions. The NSS data (NSSO 50th round) revealed that among landless agricultural labourers, the incidence of poverty is as high as 71.8 percent in Western Plain region of Assam, 83 percent in Jharkhand, 78 percent in Northern Bihar, 71.9 percent in Central Bihar, 67 percent in Eastern Haryana, 64.2 percent in Chhattisgarh, 89.6 percent in South Western Madhya Pradesh, 72 to 76 percent in various regions of Maharashtra (other than coastal and inland Western Maharashtra), 61.9 percent to 83.9 percent in different regions of Orissa, 73.5 percent in Southern Rajasthan, 65.8 percent in Northern coastal region, 73.4 percent to 89.8 percent in Central, Eastern and Southern Uttar Pradesh, 68.8 percent in Eastern part of West Bengal and 85.7 percent in Himalayan region of West Bengal.

(xviii) Agricultural Employment:

According to the Gupta Committee report of the Planning Commission, while the overall employment growth in the country fell from 2.7 per cent per annum in the 1983 to 1993-94 period to 1.07 per cent in the 1993-94 to 1999-2000 period, the biggest fall was in agriculture – from 2.23 per cent to 0.02 per cent. Even if the government somehow succeeds in hiking the farm growth to its targeted 4 per cent, that would not make any difference to the employment scenario in agriculture. Indeed, employment elasticity in the sector fell from 0.7 in the 1983 to 1993-94 period to zero in the 1993-94 to 1999-2000 period. What this means is that a 5 per cent compound growth in agricultural output that would have resulted in a 4.35 per cent employment growth in the eighties, will now lead to an employment growth of just 0.05 per cent (–0.3 per cent in principal status alone).

More than one-fifth of all casual labour days spent on non-agricultural activity in the late 1980s in rural India were on public works programmes of the government. With the decline in the growth rate of rural non-farm economy in the 1990s, and decline in public expenditure on rural development, non-farm wage employment growth also fell. The government sought to increase the spending on employment schemes in the mid-1990s but since the allocation under the NREGS scheme is less than the earlier employment assistance schemes merged into it, there is no sign of rural non-farm employment reviving.

Agricultural mechanisation is also labour-displacing. According to a field study conducted in western Uttar Pradesh, among farms of the size below 6 hectare, mechanized farms generated 138 days of employment per hectare whereas non-mechanised farms 190 days. In states like Punjab and Kerala, where agricultural wages have crossed a certain threshold, further agricultural growth is accompanied by labour-displacing mechanization rather than by greater labour absorption. This is also the reason why in-migration of labourers has come down in states like Punjab.

(xix) SHGs:

Till 2006, the banks gave Rs. 12,618 crore credit to 22.38 lakh SHGs which worked out to around Rs. 56,000 per group. Assuming that each group has 20 members, each member would have got a credit of less than an average of Rs. 3000 and what kind of self-employment and “micro-entrepreneurship” is possible with this kind of money. And the members, mostly women, pay above 18 per cent interest on these loans and even 24 per cent in states like Tamil Nadu.

(xx) Contract Farming:

ajya Sabha was informed on August 29 that 4,25,834 hectares across the country was under contract farming. Of this, 236,610 hectares under are contract farming in Tamil Nadu, 121,457 in Punjab, 59,800 in Orissa, 2,000 in Gujarat, 1,924 in Goa and 20 in Bihar. Hindustan Lever, Wimco, Pepsi, Cadbury India, Godrej Agro Escorts, Maxworth Orchards, Reliance Agrotech, United Breweries, DCM Sriram, Markfed Punjab, Sungrow, Bilt, ITC, J K Paper, A V Thomas Natural Products, Nafed, Foodpro and Mohan Breweries and distilleries are the major corporates involved in contract farming. 18 Indian states, including West Bengal, have amended the APMC Act to allow contract farming. Incidentally, Kerala, the so-called land of commercial crops, never had an APMC Act, or any other regulation of corporate/MNC entry into agricultural trade and marketing, and successive LDF governments in the state never bothered to regulate the role of even domestic merchant capital in agriculture and exploitation of farmers by traders and yet LDF leaders and eminent economists of the CPI(M) wax eloquent about the regulation of contract farming in Kerala!

(xxi) Organised Retail and Wholesale and farmers:

The entry of organised wholesale and retail big business firms into rural areas adds a qualitatively new dimension to the domination of mercantile capital over the productive capital in agriculture. Reliance, Tatas, Wal-Mart-Bharati, ITC – all are in this race. The ITC, for instance, has started establishing the socalled e-choupals which will also start marketing agricultural inputs (like seeds, chemicals, fertilisers), farm equipment (tractors, implements), consumer goods (FMCG, durables, apparel, footwear) and even financial products (insurance, credit, savings). The notorious ICICI bank has started selling animal fodder to farmers! Nearly two million tonnes of foodgrain were procured by private companies last year. The prices of both inputs and outputs are always determined by the corporate houses. This invasion of big capital in rural commerce, and the corporate market-grab, adds a new dimension to the class struggles in the countryside. The notorious drug MNC Novartis has tied up with tractor kings Mahindras and Mahindras to set up similar trade outlets.

Agri-Export Zones: The 60 Agri-Export Zones established so far have been a total failure and the UPA Government is making use of its own failure as a pretext to hand them over to private banks for revival and 10 AEZs have already been handed over to the Yes Bank, a scheduled private commercial bank with significant foreign equity participation focussing on sectors like food and agri-business, agri-infrastructure, food-processing and renewable energy.