Rural India facing the 21st century: essays on long term village change and recent development policy by Barbara Harriss-White and S. Janakarajan, (London: Anthem Press, 2004, pp. 539 + xxvii)

✍ Scribed by Supriya Garikipati

• Book ID: 102353964
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 52 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.1366

✦ Synopsis

This collection of essays is a very useful consolidation of some of the very prominent happenings in the area of agrarian change in India over the last three decades. While the book touches upon and nicely integrates discussion on the spread of Green Revolution in 1970s and linkages of agricultural growth in 1980s, it beneficially focuses on investigating long-term changes and policy implications in the rural economy in 1990s. The volume is divided into three parts: the first part analyses longterm agrarian changes, the second part examines the impact of policies affecting production and the third looks at policies affecting social welfare. The editors have added value to the contributions by providing an immensely accessible introduction to each of the three parts (chapters 1-1, 2-1 and 3-1). To the busy reader these introductions and the concluding chapter (Chapter 3-8) provide a good overview of the book and could also prove a good starting point for a graduate student. In conjunction with the companion volume, The Green Revolution and After: Studies in the Political Economy of Rural Development in South India edited by Barbara Harriss-White and John Harriss (2004, Anthem), it will be a valuable read for anyone interested in agrarian change in India.

The focus of the enquiry across the three decades is on the North Arcot District in Tamil Nadu, a rice growing, relatively poor region, with a semi-arid tropical climate and an agrarian structure dominated in numbers by small-farmers or peasants. A core of data was collected in 1973-1974 from 11 randomly selected villages and again in 1982-1983. While all were covered in a 1993-1994 census, the central core of information was updated for just three villages. Nevertheless, this enabled agrarian economic change to be tracked in a systematic way over two decades-the two agricultural policy issues that were the focus of the research in 1973-1974 were the extent of adoption of highyielding varieties (HYVs) of rice and their social impact. A number of significant findings came to light as a result of this inquiry. For instance, the adoption of HYVs was found to be just one-third of what was officially claimed (13% as against 39%) and the project warned of the increased income inequalities accentuated by adoption of HYVs by large farmers and finally warned of the impending ground-water crisis (Chapters 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 2-3 and 3-4). In 1983-1984 the policy issues examined are not only concerned with the direct impact of technical change but also its indirect multiplier effects, notably the capacity of agriculture to generate regional upstream and downstream linkages (Chapters 1-1 and 1-6, but mainly the companion volume).

The project tracks agrarian changes for 1993-1994 as in previous decades but with three critical differences. First, it has a much more limited spatial focus (just three of the original 11 villages were surveyed-one large and developed, one medium and developing and one small, remote and poor). Second, unlike in previous decades, it examines the issue of diversification of the rural economy (Chapter 1-6). Third, it attempts to use village-level studies to examine the impact of macroeconomic structural reforms on the semi-subsistence rural economy at the micro level. The project, however, had to face up to the idiosyncrasies of India's reforms as the anticipated policy adjustments refused to materialise. Tenacious resistance by the local governments resulted in dilution of a number of radical policy changes affecting the rural economy and hence threatening the rural votes. For instance, by 1993-1994 the fertiliser subsidy was partially re-imposed and the (universal) public distribution system had neither been streamlined nor had its prices changed perceptibly (Chapters 2-3 and 2-6). In these circumstances the project makes an audit of existing policies on the economies and societies of the survey villages.

Among the more important policies studied are those concerned with credit, antipoverty interventions, food and nutrition and education. The project itself unfolded some surprises of its own. Despite an increase in economic diversification, an increase in feminisation of agricultural