We take this opportunity to introduce to you all a very important paper on agrarian issues in India in the era of globalisation.
This paper describes and analyzes the impact of policies of globalization and liberalization on the agrarian economy of India. In particular, it discusses the reversal of land reform, changes in the policies of administered agricultural input costs and output prices, cutbacks in public investment in rural physical and social infrastructure, the dismantling of the institutional structure of social and development banking, the withdrawal of quantitative restrictions on the import of agricultural products, cutbacks in the public distribution system, and the undermining of national systems of research and extension and protection of national plant and other biological wealth. The data used in the paper come from the major sources of national-level official statistics and primary data collected as part of a Project on Agrarian Relations in India.
Maharashtra was the fourth State to be studied as part of the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI). Census-type surveys were conducted in May-June 2007 in two villages. This paper uses data collected from the two villages in Maharashtra, among others: Warwat Khanderao in Buldhana and Nimshirgaon in Kolhapur. Warwat Khanderao is in Sangrampur tehsil, Buldhana district, in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. Nimshirgaon is a village in Shirol taluk of Kolhapur district in the sugarcane-growing region of western Maharashtra. For more details on the villages, see http://agrarianstudies.org/pages.asp?menuid=29
The paper comes to the conclusion that "Our survey data from Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra indicate the near-impossibility, in the present circumstances, of peasant households with two hectares of operational holdings or less earning an income sufficient for family survival."
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