Market failure and control of labour power: towards an explanation of ‘structure’ and change in Indian agriculture. Part 1

Abstract

(1) Although existing approaches do, on occasion, shed light on certain specific aspects of Indian agriculture, in general they run into problems of methodology or content or (more frequently) both. In particular, it is misleading to treat Indian agri culture in 'peasant economy' (no markets) or neoclassical (perfect market) terms, and problematic to view it as 'semi-feudal' (markets subordinate to 'extra-economic' factors). (2) Analysis of the relationships between farm size, land productivity, sharecropping and mechanisation suggest the need for an integrated model which emphasises both the unemployment and poverty of poor peasants and the problems of supervision and control of wage labour and tenants. (3) Proper appreciation of the interlinked role of these factors can help to explain the system's inability to combine the abundant labour of the poor with resources owned largely by the rich. It can also go on to explain institutional responses like sharecropping (as partial solutions to the problem of intensifying labour use) and technological ones such as mechanisation (as a means of delinking large farm growth from the need to intensify labour use). (4) The tensions and choices between these responses underlie both the problem of stagnation and the phenomenon of switches from sharecropping to mechanisation. (5) For associated reasons, more rapid growth in Indian agriculture is unlikely without major institutional changes to create much new employment and is likely to be more capital intensive than is usually assumed.