Rural India: Are We Underestimating the Pace of Change?

In India, the Utopian image of an idyllic rural community untouched by change has occupied the centre stage of various discourses for a variety of reasons. A recent central thematic concern has been the problems that Indian  agriculture faces including its inability and lack of profitability. This lack of profitability has created numerous hurdles that dis-incentivise change - like investing in technology, etc. The reasons cited vary from (in order of precedence) small size/uneconomic size of holdings, lack of credit, rising cost of inputs (favourite whipping target: NREGA) and a host of complex issues (that often confuse any observer). Conventional wisdom is all encompassing and those who refuse to conform to the consensus do so at great risk. 

Historically, the consensus has been very often wrong in predicting the nature of economic (and the attendant social) change in Indian agriculture. This may be about to happen again. A remarkable feature of the rural landscape over the past two years is the increased visibility of machines in the fields. Interestingly, these machines dot the landscape of not only the more prosperous regions of the country but also the supposedly more ''backward'' regions. In Andhra Pradesh, a visit through the rural areas shows the increased presence of these machines. Ironically, the growing spread of the use of the machines seems to fly against another conventional claim that they can be profitable only when deployed in large sized holdings - implicitly a view that backs large scale "corporatisation of agriculture". While profitability is always a relative calculation, the fact that even small sized holdings in rural Andhra Pradesh prefer to deploy machines (as in the picture below) indicates that we may be underestimating the pace of change in rural India. 

The picture from Medipoor Village of Mahabubnagar District is illustrative. Harvesters are now used in small holdings (often to harvest paddy in less than 1 acre). The picture is significant of a trend for the simple reason that Mahabubnagar is considered to be one of the poorest regions of AP. The size of holdings where the harvester has been deployed is mostly less than 2 acres. 

What is often missed is that it not the uneconomic size of holdings that primarily hinders investing in agriculture or introduction of new practices. It is often the inability of the small and marginal producers to navigate volatility in a financialised, globalised electronic market place. Unfortunately, precious little is being done to help the small producers to navigate price volatility and information asymmetry that pervades through out rural India.

Probably, change may be closer to Rural Society and Economy than we would like to believe.