From Green Revolution to Rural Industrial Revolution in South IndiaEconomic and Political Weekly

By Barbara Harriss-White, S. Janakarajan on June 25, 1997

Abstract: The economic reforms of the 1990s have deprioritised the agricultural sector and also diverted attention away from scholarly concerns about agrarian transformation. Some the reform rhetoric can be shown openly to confront the interests of the mass of agricultural producers. This paper describes and summarises the results of research into agrarian development carried out over two decades in northern Tamil Nadu. Mediocre growth, the stagnation of yields and persistent instability of output are all confirmed. Social differentiation continues apace, accentuated by the relations of environmental plunder surrounding the use of water. To an important extent small-scale producers persist in their dependence upon traders' credit for agricultural and non-agricultural production. While agriculture is mired in a 'green reaction', de-agrarianisation and rural industrialisation have provided a mass of livelihoods to the lower agricultural castes which constitute the small peasantry and agricultural labour force, resulting in an expansion of household forms of production dependent on commercial finance and on (black) investment capital migrating out of urban areas. These opportunities are heavily screened by class, caste and gender. Its technological backwardness and its use of children prised from school into the hardly paid household labour force suggest that this rural industrialisation will not be a base from which a classic industrial capitalist labour process will emerge.

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