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VOL. 3, ISSUE 1 (2021)
Industrialisation in India: A study of dying agriculture and dying farmers
Authors
Atashi Rath
Abstract
The five year plans in the post-independence period and the New Economic Reforms of the 90s ushered in a process of industrialisation in the country. Increasing thrust on industrial schemes and policies led to an agrarian distress which proved disastrous for the poor Indian farmers across the country. Industrialisation generated a host of non-agricultural employment opportunities for the rural mass and led to the transfer of these rural mass to the towns. This led to the genesis of a new urban capitalist class and a residuary rural peasantry consisting of the small and marginal farmers, casual agricultural workers and landless labourers. There was a decline in food production due to shrinking rural farms and increasing demand for food in industrial areas to feed the growing population which created a pressure on the rural agrarian farms. Industrialisation followed by urbanization also led to mass engulfing of rural farm lands for their infrastructural and other institutional set-up. It promoted the interference of global actors in Indian markets, corporatization of agricultural inputs and with drawl of agricultural subsidies which increased the prices of farm inputs in the market making themselves inaccessible to the small and marginal farmers. All these, along with non-availability of institutional credit, made the farmers vulnerable to serious agrarian distress and they were dragged to an ever increasing and vicious debt trap. Unable to get out of the trap, the poor farmers committed suicides that were reported across various states since 1980s. The present article tries to make a detailed sketch of the growth of industrialisation in the country vis-à-vis agriculture in three major phase i.e. the pre-independence, post-independence and the new economic reforms phase including the peasant revolts that erupted during these phase, to study the impact of industrialisation on Indian agriculture leading to uprooting of the later and anatomise the industry driven farmer suicides in various parts of the country, including Odisha.
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Pages:15-19
How to cite this article:
Atashi Rath "Industrialisation in India: A study of dying agriculture and dying farmers ". International Journal of Sociology and Political Science, Vol 3, Issue 1, 2021, Pages 15-19
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