Changing Agrarian Relations and Rural Livelihoods: A Comparative Analysis of Eastern and Western Uttar Pradesh, India

Abstract

The incorporation of the Indian economy into the global capitalist system has led to the growth of the informal sector within the agricultural sector, which is largely involved in the petty commodity production of both agricultural and non-agricultural commodities. This means that agrarian transformation, in general, and surplus appropriation, in particular, can no longer be only explained through the capitalist-proletariat relations as there has been an overall structural change in the Indian economy where labour is moving out of agriculture, not primarily to manufacturing, but to the services, not to the formal sector but to the informal economy, and mostly through self-employment rather than through wage employment. Secondly, while a substantial proportion of agriculture-dependent workers are self-employed, self-employment in agriculture is typically understood through undifferentiated categories such as cultivators and farmers. Such a distinction where the peasantry is treated as a uniform group fails to account for the diverse material conditions, class relations, ownership of land, access to capital, agricultural practices, and social status that define different groups within the peasantry. Thirdly, it has also been noted that with the neoliberal reforms, the agrarian economy has undergone a significant change in the production, accumulation and exchange relations in the countryside with distinct regional trajectories of agrarian change. Taking this as a vantage point, the present paper attempts to analyse the key questions of agrarian change through a regional framework by focusing on the eastern and western parts of Uttar Pradesh, India. The study is based on an in-depth field survey of 320 households in four villages in the Muzaffarnagar, Firozabad, Amethi, and Sonbhadra districts.  Muzaffarnagar and Amethi are relatively agriculturally developed, while Firozabad and Sonbhadra are relatively less developed districts