Rural Development and Politics in India

Abstract

T HIS ESSAY ARGUES that there has been much progress in rural India during the last three decades-socially and politically as well as economically-that this progress has created a new politics of class in the countryside, and that the class line which is an effect of development and cause of the new politics is in turn changing the direction of rural development programs. Progress in rural India's economic development is evidenced by a rise in the average annual outturn of foodgrains from 58 million tonnes in the early nineteen-fifties (1951-54) to 71 million tonnes at the end of that decade (1957-60), to 96 million tonnes at the end of the sixties (1967-70), to 111 million tonnes by the mid-seventies (1974-77), and to what looks like averaging over 130 million tonnes as India enters the eighties.' Suffice it to say this exceeds the rate of population growth and is better than the Japanese ever did until after the Second World War.2 If the argument for social progress is not strong, it is not so weak either. First, the old men are gone: the large zamindars and talukdars of Uttar Pradesh, the lords of whole villages in Punjab and Haryana, and elsewhere most of those once big landlords of whom the Congress Movement promised to rid India. If other well-to-do people now dominate the countryside, these new rich are of another sort, deriving their wealth from increasingly efficient and productive farming-not all of them, but many of them. In fact, with the coming of modern irrigation, especially where on-farm wells provide a guaranteed supply of water, a new kind of cultivator has arisen, a cultiva-