Population Pressure and Labour Intensification: An Indian Historical Perspective

Abstract

Population pressure on land can unambiguously be associated with falling land–person ratios. However, the consequent agrarian change may be manysided, involving multiple cropping, technological improvements for raising the productivity of land and labour, shifts to high-valued crops, and so on. This complex process is not pursued here in its totality; instead the focus is on one of the underlying factors, namely labour intensification. The partiality needs an explanation. The proliferation of households with small landholdings has been a characteristic feature of Indian agriculture since Independence. This persistence and its obvious connection with demographic change has not attracted as much scholarly attention as did the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity, noticed from the early 1960s onwards, with distinctly higher levels of output per unit of land in the smaller holdings. The well-documented inverse correlation has been the subject of much economic analysis: the higher use of labour (especially family labour) has been identified as a key causal factor. It is possible to regard both these empirical findings—the growing number of small farms, and the intense use of labour in them—as two inter-related aspects of the same long-term dynamics associated with population pressure working under changing economic conditions: one seen at the macro level and the other at the household level. This paper is an attempt to arrive at a synthesis of the Indian experience based on such an understanding. Section I provides a brief review of some relevant theoretical perspectives. First, the theories of Malthus and Boserup are considered, which directly refer to the effects of population growth and pressure; and then the discussion moves on to Marxist formulations of the persistence of the small peasant economy set out in the general context of the development of capitalism, in which, however, the influence of demographic factors hardly ever finds a place. Thereafter, Sections II and III present some statistical analyses of the post- and pre-Independence periods, respectively. This reversal of the chronological order in the presentation is useful because for the period after Independence, there is a need to present only the substance of the extensive literature on the subject, which, moreover, provides some hindsight for analysing the sparse data of the earlier period. Concluding remarks appear in the final section.