Outside the scope of the heated debates going on in the country to find out ways and means ensuring the country’s socio-economic progress, there lie some excrementally important characteristics of the main branch of national economy- agriculture, employing more than seventy percent of the country’s labor force and producing about 40 percent of its national income which pose the most serious threat to the country’s socio-economic well being and stability. Over dependence of population on agriculture is the single most important pointer to the backward state of Indian economy. The seriousness of the problem is compounded by the fact that while the population of the country has doubled during the post independence period, the fraction of population dependent upon agriculture has remained more or less constant. This single factor largely accounts for the failure of agrarian reforms in freeing the system of feudal exploitation. The process of the capitalist transformation of the modern Indian countryside far from eliminating social and economic disproportions has tended, in a number of cases, to aggravate them. The bulk of the peasantry, mostly its lower ranks while gradually increasing in numbers has proved to be isolated from the general process of capitalist evolution, becoming the target of economic exploitation of the capitalist oriented village elite. The purpose of production for millions of small land holders under such circumstances becomes their personal consumption which is barely sufficient to reproduce the working force. In effect the vast majority of village producers retain a natural or semi – natural economy and provides the base of capitalist relations in the agrarian sector of the economy. The traditional over lords of the Indian villages – the feudal landlords, traders money-lenders and the new elite emerging with the development of capitalist relations appropriate and sell the greater part of the surplus product created by the peasants. This small group of exploiters monopolies the dynamics of prices for raw materials and food. The agrarian relations in the villages are still marked by the preservation on a large scale of a natural economy on the small peasant holdings that have been drawn into the whirlpool of the commodity money relations that prevail outside the villages. And while the peasant grows his produce chiefly for his own consumption and to pay his rent and his debt to the money lender, the big estate owners view the peasant’s produce from the point of view of its exchange value. The estate owners are interested only in the peasant’s produce for its exchange value and this predetermines their desire to get as much as possible and the growing rate of exploitation. And the increasing population is introduced to an element of competition within the exploited masses who for want of other openings fall back upon agriculture as the only alternative available. In as much as capitalism does not dominate in India’s multifaceted socio-economic structure, profits do not operate as regulators of production in the largest sector of the national economy-agriculture. Since the village elite is able to control production and appropriates, irrespective of the cost of production, a considerable part of the surplus and often the necessary product of the small peasants and tenants share croppers, it quite often receives the greater part of its income not in the form of profits but in the from of pre-capitalist rent or interest on loans. This includes also those of the elite who work their land with the use of hired labor. The incomes extracted from the peasant and tenant holdings are pre-capitalist in type and source but in their size they as a rule, greatly exceed the amount of profits received from capitalist type farms. It should also be noted that when the surplus product is appropriated in this form, the cost of production is a practically non existent item and the rate of income can not even be compared with the rate of profit. This situation imposes harsh stricture on the development of capitalism in India’s agricultural sector. The overwhelming mass of the surplus product created in agriculture takes the form of land rent, interest on loans and other pre-capitalist forms of appropriation. This reflects not only the scale of penetration of capital in the villages but also the general conditions of its reproduction.
Posted on: Wed, 21 Aug 2013 19:50:49 +0000