In India, among progressive circles, there has been controversy as to the trend of agrarian legislation by Congress Governments in various States of India, and as to the character and extent of development of capitalist production relations in agriculture in the countryside. But it is generally agreed now that

the Government of India, which is a bourgeois–landlord Government in which the bourgeoisie is the leading force, strives to curb feudal forms of exploitation, transforming feudal landlords into capitalist landlords, and creates a structure of rich peasantry that can act as the social base of the bourgeoisie in the countryside.

During the last 12 years of its rule, how far has the Indian bourgeoisie been able to achieve this objective? I confine myself to Andhra Pradesh in this article and do not take up other States, of which I have not made even the little study I have with regard to Andhra Pradesh. I also do not show here how far class differentiation among the peasantry took place in various areas in Andhra Pradesh under British imperialist rule.

Andhra Pradesh now consists of 20 districts, 11 of the old Madras State and nine Telangana districts of the old Hyderabad State, with an area of 106,000 square miles and an estimated population of 35 million in the middle of 1959.

In the 11 districts of old Madras State, or “Andhra districts,” out of 40.55 million acres, zamindars collected land revenue and other exactions till 1948 over an area of 11.1 million acres, or 27.5 per cent of the land area. Inam tenure existed on about 0.45 million acres, that is, on 11 per cent of the land area. Zamindari tenure, by an Act of 1908 – the Madras Estates Land Act – was restricted to the collection of fixed land rents from tenant cultivators under the zamindars. Tenants were given occupancy tenancy, that is, they could enjoy the cultivation of the land hereditarily as long as they paid the annual rent. But the zamindars were in charge of forests and pasture lands, communal lands, and irrigational sources, apart from considerable tracts of self-cultivated lands (called seri or sir land). They used these facilities to extract many illegal exactions and exorbitant rents from the tenant cultivators. By refusing to give proper receipts, they used to claim that the tenants were in arrears of land rent, and tried to evict even the occupancy tenants and take over their land. Apart from all of this, they used to levy, in many backward areas, forced labour.

As a result of the nationalist movement and many peasant struggles in the twenties and thirties of this century, many of these illegal exactions were reduced. In 1948, by means of the Abolition of Estates Act, the Congress Government took over the business of collecting rent from the zamindars, as also their rights over communal and forest land and all irrigation sources. But the Congress Government agreed to pay about 1,000 million rupees as compensation to the zamindars, and conferred proprietorship with respect to thousands of acres of seri or sir (that is, self-cultivated) land possessed by each of them.

Most of the zamindars, such as the Rajas of Challapalli, Yelamarru, Munagala, Bobbili, Kapileswarapuram, and others, sold their land and invested it in some industry or other. What they could not dispose of, they converted into large-scale farms or sugarcane farms, cultivated and managed by paid employees.

The inam tenure consisted mostly of land donated by old feudatory princes or landlords, who gave the right to collect land rent from the peasant cultivators to certain brahmans or people who had done something that gratified those feudatory landlords; this tenure also covered land for traditional village services such as those of washermen, barbers, cobblers, devadasis, etc. The Congress Government hesitated till 1956 to abolish inam tenures and confer full proprietorship on the actual cultivators of the land, and then they passed an Act that gave half to the actual tiller and the other half to the inamdar who never cultivated or owned the land. Plenty of litigation goes on now over whether a particular inam comes under estate and the provisions of the Estates Abolition Act apply to it, or whether it comes under a minor inam, in which case the Inam Act of 1956 applies (and by which the peasant cultivator loses half the land he and his family used to cultivate for generations).

In Telangana districts, land was under jagirdari, paiga and sarf-e-khas tenures, all three forms of tenure being completely feudal forms of land ownership. These were abolished only in 1949 after the Police Action.¹ In the whole of Hyderabad State, out of 22,457 villages, 6,535 were jagir villages and 1,961 sarf-e-khas villages, both constituting 48 per cent of the total villages.² These jagir and sarf-e-khas villages covered about 33,730 square miles or 41 per cent of a total area of 82,700 square miles. Of these, there were 2,730 jagir villages in the Telangana region that used to pay about 20 million rupees as rent and taxes to the jagirdars, out of about 3.5 crore (35 million) rupees paid by all jagir villages in the whole of Hyderabad State. The Government had to pay a compensation of 110 million rupees to jagirdars in the Telangana region, and about Rs 2,500,000 as perpetual annuities to the Nizam for his sarf-e-khas villages.

Apart from these jagirdars, there were deshmukhs, maktedars, and banjardars, who occupied large tracts of land, got them cleared of forest by the peasants, and made the peasants cultivate the land and pay them rent. Later on, they tried to evict the peasant cultivators. It was against these evictions, illegal exactions, and forced labour by the deshmukhs, maktedars, and banjardars that the Telangana peasant movement was organised and struggles waged between 1945 and 1951; the movement reached the point of seizing and distributing even the so-called “self-cultivated” land of these landlords. It was to suppress this Telangana peasant movement, as well as the Nizam’s recalcitrance with respect to joining the Indian Union, that the Delhi Government marched in its troops in 1948.

Although the Telangana peasant movement, suppressed by the might of the armed forces of the Indian Government, had to be withdrawn, the Government had to enact the Hyderabad Tenancy Act of 1952, conferring the right of “protected tenancy” on all peasant cultivators who were in occupation of land in 1952. Protected tenants not only got occupancy rights, but also the first right of purchase of the land that they had thus far cultivated. Yet, in spite of this Act and because of many loopholes in it, about 50 per cent of the land under the protected tenants was seized and sold by the landlords in areas where the movement was weak.

As early as 1945, in order to evade the tenancy Acts of Hyderabad, a large number of deshmukhs and big landlords took to extensive self-cultivation, employing 50 to 100 farm servants each and using 100 ploughs to cultivate farms of a few hundred acres at a stretch. This trend [towards self-cultivation], as in the Andhra districts, has strengthened after the merger of Hyderabad with the Indian Union. There has been large-scale selling of land by these landlords, especially with the Hyderabad Tenancy Act coming into force after 1952. (According to the provisions of this Act, no holding should be bigger than is necessary to yield an income of Rs 3,600 per year; the area of such a holding is estimated to vary, in different parts of Telangana, from 20 acres of wet land to 200 acres of dry land.)

An Analysis of Rural Class Stratification
as Obtained from Official Sources of Data

Is there any way to find out what is the class differentiation that actually exists and is developing in the countryside? In fact there is very little scientific data to really understand the situation in the countryside, as the various statistics gathered by the governmental agencies do not take a scientific standpoint on different class divisions in the countryside. Of whatever exists, the best are the Census of India 1951 with its occupational categories; the Agricultural Labour Enquiry Committee reports and surveys pertaining to 1951–52; the Census of Landholdings for 1953–54; and some individual surveys of certain villages.

What do these figures reveal?

In the Census of 1951, all persons are grouped into eight categories as per their occupation. Category I consists of cultivators of land wholly or mainly owned; Category II consists of cultivators of land wholly or mainly unowned; Category III consists of cultivating labourers; Category IV consists of those living on agricultural rent; Category V consists of other occupations (that is, other than cultivation); Category VI covers commerce; Category VII covers transport; and Category VIII, other services and miscellaneous services.

While examining the Census figures to determine the percentage of agricultural labourers, it is no use counting only Category III and Category II, that is, agricultural labourers and landless tenants respectively. Landless tenants are mostly tenants-at-will who take land on lease on a yearly basis on a rent in kind of ½ to ¾ of gross produce, and surrender it after a year to the landowner and take it again on lease – such tenants are, as such, to be classified along with agricultural labourers. Their yearly income from these leased lands would at most get them the equivalent of the annual wages of a farm servant or even less, and that too in good seasons.

Actually, the numbers shown in Categories V and VIII, especially of those in these two categories who live in rural areas, are mostly of workers who pursue allied occupations similar to agricultural labour, and should, as such, be added to the agricultural labour population or rural labour population. Further, for any wage struggle of any section of these various categories of rural labourers, unless there is solidarity and united struggle, it will be practically impossible to win any concessions. All these various categories thirst for land, and, in the course of radical agrarian reform, one simply cannot ignore these categories when distributing land.

The people who are grouped in Category V and Category VIII are people living on wood-cutting, selling fuel, fishing, tending animals, making and selling dairy produce, making bricks and tiles, rice-pounding, and working as domestic servants, toddy tappers, blacksmiths and carpentry workers, washermen, cobblers, barbers, pottery makers, weavers, etc. Each one of these professions is a separate caste in Indian society, and it is quite possible that when the Census enumerator questions a respondent about his occupation, the reply he gets would refer to the caste-based profession, which would have been his normal whole-time profession in the old self-sufficient village economy. But now-a-days most of these professions are not whole-time and most of the people involved in them earn their livelihoods by wage labour from agricultural operations, especially during the transplanting, harvesting, and other busy seasons.

In the Census, rural areas are defined as those villages having less than 5,000 people. In fact only centres with a population of more than 20,000 persons really have the characteristics of towns, and only those pursuing these various professions in such places have whole-time work that becomes the main source of their livelihoods. So we can safely include all those enumerated in Categories V and VIII in the rural areas in 1951 in the category of agricultural or rural labourers. It is true that there are teachers, doctors, and other government employees covered by Category VIII, and quite possibly some other persons following similar professions covered by Category V – persons whom one should not normally include in the category of agricultural or rural labourers. But their number in the rural areas is so small that it does not affect the broad picture of the rural scene or share in the population of the main socio-economic classes.

The calculation above gives us the following results (Table 1).

Thus, 84 per cent of people in Andhra Pradesh live on agriculture and allied occupations. Half of those that live on agriculture are landless agricultural labourers or tenants-at-will. About 2.5 per cent of this section lives by leasing their lands and the other 47.5 per cent by cultivating their plots of land.

When the same analysis is carried out on a regional basis, that is, for the seven coastal districts, the four Rayalaseema districts, and the nine Telangana districts, we see that agricultural labourers and landless tenants constitute 45 per cent of the total population and 53 per cent of the agricultural population in coastal districts, 37 per cent of the total population and 42 per cent of the agricultural population in the Rayalaseema districts, and 42 per cent of the total population and 54 per cent of the agricultural population in the Telangana districts.

These regional figures, calculated from the Census of India figures for 1951, are corroborated by the figures from the Agricultural Labour Enquiry Committee Report pertaining to the same year, 1950–51, and the deductions drawn from them. The basis for this Report is a detailed survey of 20 villages in the coastal districts, eight villages in the four Rayalaseema districts, and 15 villages in the nine Telangana districts. Census enumerators of 1951 asked an agricultural labourer his principal means of livelihood or occupation, and if he answered that his primary income was from land (normally, if a caste Hindu owns even a little land he says that his livelihood is from land, though he may derive a good part of his livelihood from agricultural wages), he was enumerated as being a self-cultivating owner, that is, in Category I. Hence a good chunk of people classified in Category I are actually to be classified as agricultural workers. But in the Agricultural Labour Enquiry, any person who worked as an agricultural worker for more than one-half of the total number of days on which he actually performed work during the year was treated as an agricultural worker. Such persons were sub-divided into “agricultural workers with land” and “agricultural workers without land.” Hence the Agricultural Labour Enquiry and its results are more scientific, although the survey is confined to a few randomly selected villages.

Similarly, with regard to tenants, the Agricultural Labour Enquiry adopted the local terminology, whereas the Census enumerator was asked to include every tenure that involved the right of permanent occupancy of land for purposes of cultivation, provided it was heritable. In this case, the Census figures are more scientific than the Agricultural Labour Enquiry because, in many States, the Agricultural Labour Enquiry showed tenants with heritable occupancy rights as being merely tenants and thus enhanced their number. This defect does not, however, affect the figures for tenants as far as Andhra Pradesh is concerned, because here the local term “kauludarudu” is synonymous with tenant-at-will, and all other tenants with any kind of inheritable occupancy are called “rytulu,” along with other peasant proprietors.

The results of the Agricultural Labour Enquiry Committee are given in the following tables. Their enumeration is of families and not of individuals as in the Census of India.

The Agricultural Labour Enquiry Committee figures for agricultural labourers, rural labourers, and tenants approximate the Census figures (reworked) for rural labourers including tenants.

The slight variation can be easily explained when we understand the very approximate nature of the Agricultural Labour Enquiry averages, based as they are on about 43 villages out of nearly 27,000 villages in Andhra Pradesh.

Further, on the basis of personal checks in many villages, I consider the Census of India figures as re-computed by me to give a truer picture of the reality of the countryside of Andhra Pradesh than the original classification. It is true that I have not collected house-to-house statistics, but I have verified the premises on which I started, and the nearness of the figures for the share of rural labourers as given village-wise in the 1951 District Census Handbooks to the calculations above.

Before we take up the conditions of agricultural labourers, let us look at the general class differentiation among the peasantry, or the so-called “self-cultivating landowners” of the Census. For this, we have to go to the Census of Landholdings taken in 1953–54. The standard acre in the Andhra region in this Census is taken to be “1 acre of wet land on which the assessment exceeds Rs 7.50 but does not exceed Rs 10,” and, in the case of dry land, “1 acre with an assessment of Rs 1.50 to Rs 3 as ³/₈ of a standard acre, while other lands with varying assessments were shown as a fraction of the standard acre.” In the Telangana area, where the figures in the Census of Landholdings were given in converted dry acres, 4 to 6 acres of dry land (the precise extent varying by region) were taken as the equivalent of 1 acre of ordinary wet land. For purposes of comparison and to get a broad picture, I have assumed that 5 acres of converted dry land in Telangana are equivalent to 1 standard acre in the Andhra region.

Another factor to be noted here is that, by 1953–54, land ceilings were already in the air, and many landlords in both the Andhra and Telangana regions had subdivided their holdings among their close relatives – wives, sons, and daughters – in order to escape the ceiling. So even these holdings do not fully give the real concentration of land in the families of landlords. This picture has further intensified over the last five years. So, unless the extent of holdings in the names of husband, wife, minor sons and unmarried daughters, and other dependants are taken as a whole, we neither arrive at estimates of the real concentration of land, nor of the composition (in terms of the shares of different sections) of the peasantry.

Leaving out some special exceptions, it can be broadly taken that families having less than 1 standard acre depend mainly on wage labour and can be classified as rural labourers, and that those having between 1 and 2.5 standard acres can be classified as poor or small peasants who, though they mainly depend upon the income from their small plots of land, are forced to supplement these incomes through wage labour or other auxiliary professions in order to make both ends meet (albeit at the meagre level at which they are living). These families do not normally employ wage labour. Families that have between 2.5 and 5 standard acres can be classified as middle peasants, who employ wage labour in busy agricultural seasons, and also farm boys to look after the cattle and do some household work, as is the general practice in the fertile deltaic tracts of the Godavari and Krishna rivers. However, we can (at most) consider their income to be more from their own labour than from the exploitation of wage labour. Families that have between 5 and 10 standard acres regularly employ farm servants, apart from employing daily wage labourers in busy seasons. Among all major agricultural communities, male household members generally work on the land. Women too work on the land, although among the so-called “advanced” castes – including peasant castes that are also economically dominant, such as Kshatriyas, Reddis, Kamma and Kapus – women do not, as a rule, work in field operations. In a good chunk of these families, the males too do not actually do any manual labour, even in important agricultural operations (there are many such cases in the fertile delta area). And lastly, we can safely assume that those who own more than 10 standard acres normally do not do any physical labour in any of the agricultural operations, but get their land cultivated by hiring wage labour. This can be taken as the general pattern in the whole of Andhra Pradesh.

If we convert the Census figures on individuals to families (on the assumption that a family consists of five people), we get the following picture for the whole of Andhra Pradesh (Table 5).

If a holding is taken to correspond to a family (although in actual practice it is not strictly so), the number of families owning more than 1 standard acre is, by the Census of Landholdings, 2.52 million, which is very near the Census of India figure of 2.58 million families, that is, less by only 0.06 million. Those who hold less than 1 standard acre, according to the Census of Landholdings, number 1.73 million, and are in fact included in Categories II, III, V, and VIII, and partly in Category I of the general Census of India. So we can take the number of agricultural or rural labourer families to be 2.62 + 0.06 = 2.68 million. In broad numbers, the class picture in the countryside of Andhra is as below (Table 6).

Landowners having more than 10 standard acres constitute about 4.5 per cent of the population and possess nearly 40 per cent of the land. At the other end, rural and agricultural labourers and small peasants who own less than 2.5 standard acres constitute 75 per cent of the agricultural population and own 21 per cent of the land. Rural and agricultural labourers constitute 50 per cent of the population and possess only 6.4 per cent of land.

Land Leased Out

As for the Census of Landholdings, the amount of total land leased out in standard acres is only 0.712 million acres in the Andhra districts, out of a total area of 7.68 million standard acres, that is, about 9.5 per cent. In the Andhra districts, those owning more than 20 standard acres leased out 0.255 million acres (or 16 per cent) of their 1.58 million standard acres. In 1956, the Andhra State Government enacted a Tenancy Protection Act, reducing rents to 50 per cent of gross produce and guaranteeing three years occupancy for all existing tenants. But, in fact, the law has many loopholes, and, given the partiality of the State administration, thousands of tenants have been evicted from these lands. Today, other than religious endowments and a few large landowners, most landlords have evicted their tenants from their land. Leaseholds exist under disguised forms, as “personal” cultivation, but with the tenants executing bonds as farm servants of the landlords concerned.

By an Ordinance of 1957, the Government of Andhra Pradesh compelled the landowners who owned over 20 ordinary acres (dry or wet or both) in the Andhra region to declare their possessions as on September 1957; the results were published in 1959. Here is a comparative table of the 1953 Land Census and of the 1957 results in ordinary acres (Table 7).

In the size-class 20–50 ordinary acres, the extent of land leased out fell by 150,000 acres (or 46 per cent of the extent of land leased out in 1953). In the size-class 50–100 acres, the extent of land leased out fell by 60,000 acres (or 30 per cent of the extent of land leased out in 1953). In the size-class of over 100 ordinary acres, land leased out increased by about 90,000 acres, which was perhaps on account of commercial or large-scale leaseholds. In any case, the extent of land leased out has come down well below even the 9.5 per cent level of 1953.

In the Telangana region as well, the amount of land leased according to the Census of Landholdings is about 2,779,000 ordinary acres, of which 1,535,000 ordinary acres are with the protected tenants. So the tenants-at-will have about 1,244,000 ordinary acres out of a total acreage of 16,200,000 ordinary acres owned by private owners, or a little less than 8 per cent of the total extent of land.

So, the vast area belonging to owners of more than 10 standard acres, that is, nearly 40 per cent of the total extent of land, is cultivated entirely by wage labour, and another 20 per cent of the land, belonging to owners who own between 5 and 10 standard acres, is cultivated primarily by wage labour and partly by family labour. The total amount of land leased out by these groups in 1953–54 was only 1 million standard acres out of 7.6 million standard acres owned by them, or about 13 per cent of the total area, a share that would have contracted further by now.

The Conditions of Agricultural Labourers

Wages and Employment

According to the Agricultural Labour Enquiry Committee Report, the average daily wage of a male adult worker in the Andhra region is Rs 1.05, while that of a woman is about Re 0.70 per day. It varies either way, depending on the nature of agricultural work and the season, in the case of men by Re 0.35 and in the case of women by about Re 0.20. In the Telangana region, the average daily wage is Re 0.80 for men and Re 0.50 for women, with about the same variation as in the Andhra region. In tribal areas, the average daily wage is only Re 0.60 for men and Re 0.55 for women, with a variation of Re 0.25 for men and Re 0.12 for women.

Another telling illustration of the wretched condition of agricultural labourers is seen in the following table, which analyses the share of person-days of employment by size-class of daily wage rates, by region and by sex (Table 9).

From Table 9 we see that, depending on the region, 36 per cent to 88 per cent of women, and 9 per cent to 56 per cent of men, work for a daily wage of less than Re 0.62 a day. Practically all women work for a daily wage of less than Rs 1.12 per day. For men, this share (that is, of those who work for less than Rs 1.12 per day) varies from 60 per cent of workers in the coastal districts to almost all workers in the tribal areas.

The average number of days of employment that the casual agricultural labourer gets in a year is given in Table 10.

That is, men get employment for six to eight months, womenfolk for about five months, and children for five to seven months in a year.

The average annual income and expenditure of an agricultural family, calculated on the basis of intensive family studies in 20 villages of the coastal districts, 8 Rayalaseema villages, and 15 Telangana villages, are in Table 11.

The average expenditure of an agricultural family on various items, and the share of these items in total expenditure, are given region-wise below (Table 12).

Even the daily intake of cereals per capita, which constitutes practically the whole diet, varies according to the total earning of each family (Table 13).

To give an idea of the wretched condition of the agricultural labourers, I give below the quantity of different types of foodstuff a family of four (or three consumption units) consumes in a year, calculated on the basis of the intensive family surveys of the Agricultural Labour Enquiry Committee Report.

Indebtedness

In the Andhra region, 50 per cent of the agricultural labour families were in debt, with an average debt of Rs 84 per indebted family. In Telangana, 62 per cent of families were indebted, with an average debt of Rs 136 per indebted family. Loans are mainly taken for consumption purposes, the share of loans taken for consumption purposes being 75 per cent in Telangana and 85 per cent in Andhra. Loans are also taken for social purposes, the share varying from 10 to 15 per cent. In Telangana, 66 per cent of the total debt was owed to moneylenders and 20 per cent to employers, the amount owed to cooperatives being practically nil or 1 per cent. The same more or less applies to the Andhra region as well.

The most obnoxious feature of this indebtedness is usury in kind, called “nagulu.” In the lean season (and just two months before the harvest season), an agricultural labourer, faced with unemployment, goes to the landlord or the rich peasant under whom he generally works either as casual labourer or as annual farm servant, and takes a loan in kind, promising to pay back, in the harvest season, 1.5 bags to 2 bags of paddy for every bag he borrows. This amounts to about 200 to 400 per cent interest per annum. Sometimes the agricultural labourer pledges the labour of his whole family at half the average rates that would prevail in the harvest season and they work on the creditor–landlord’s family fields until he clears the loan he takes.

House-Sites

The areas where agricultural labourers live, especially the areas inhabited by the scheduled castes, are the worst low-lying places in the villages. In the rainy seasons, they look more like sewage pits than living quarters. The houses are so crowded together that one can hardly pass through. In many villages, every one-room hut contains two or three families. Families have been petitioning the Government for decades for the grant of house-sites. Applications submitted two decades ago are still pending. The Minister for Labour in Andhra Pradesh had to admit on the floor of the Assembly that to provide house-sites of 3 cents (0.03 acre) per household in the deltaic area and 5 cents (0.05 acre) per household in dry areas would cost the Government, in terms of the compensation it would have to pay landlords for the acquisition of house-sites, about Rs 500 million. The Government is now spending about half a million rupees per year; at this rate, it would take 1,000 years to give house-sites to all the people who need them (even if, meanwhile, it was somehow able to keep the numbers of people demanding house-sites from exceeding the present figures).

The condition of agricultural labourers has worsened during the decade after 1951. Their numbers have grown; the number of days of employment even in busy agricultural labour seasons such as transplanting and harvesting has fallen sharply (this fall has been estimated by our field workers to have been by one-third to one-fourth); the migration of labour families from one place to another in the course of a year in search of work has increased; and, worst of all, while wages have remained more or less the same, the prices of foodstuff have shot up by at least 50 per cent.

The condition of small peasants owning between 1 and 2.5 standard acres is equally bad. They hold, on average, 1.6 standard acres, which yield a net annual income for the family of Rs 450. This is apart from what they earn by going for wage labour or other subsidiary occupations. They have to sell their grain during the harvest season at prices that are 25 per cent less than the prices that the landlords and rich peasants get during the lean months, that is, from August to October. They have to pay usurious rates of interest for the loans they are forced to take for agricultural purposes or for any household necessities.

It is only by organising these village poor – the agricultural labourers and the poor or small peasants, who constitute 75 per cent of the agricultural population – that the progress of the Indian countryside can be assured. This has to be on the basis of a thoroughgoing agrarian revolution, with the land of all landlords being distributed to agricultural labourers and the poor peasantry (without touching the land of rich peasants). Unfortunately, however, this section is thus far the least organised section of the Indian peasantry.

The Development of Capitalist Production

To study the further development of capitalist production in agriculture it is not enough to see that farms of over a certain size use wage labour (in Andhra Pradesh, holdings over 5 standard acres are partly cultivated by means of wage labour, and holdings of 10 standard acres and above are cultivated entirely by means of wage labour). It would be highly revealing and instructive if we can see:

1. to what extent these various categories of farms (holdings) use chemical fertilizers and pesticides;
2. to what extent these various categories of farms use improved agricultural implements, such as iron ploughs, tractors, diesel oil engines, and electric pumps for baling out water;
3. which farmers predominate in the cultivation of highly lucrative and intensive capital-consuming commercial crops such as sugarcane, tobacco, and citrus and other orchards;
4. how much cooperative credit or other loans from Government is received by cultivators; and
5. who owns the land with the best soil and irrigation facilities.

Unfortunately, statistics on these aspects are meagre, and even the statistics that exist are tabulated most unscientifically, in order to conceal the sharp class differentiation among the peasantry.

If we take the Andhra region, one can see the gradual development of commercial crops (Table 15).

The area under commercial crops looks negligible when taken as a share of the entire cultivated (sown) area. Oilseeds, cotton, and condiments are grown on unirrigated and even poor soils, by even poor and middle peasants. But if one looks at the area under sugarcane, tobacco, and citrus fruit and vegetables in relation to the taluks or subdivisions of taluks in which they usually occupy a prominent place, one can visualise the prosperity of the landowners and the intensive development of farming.

Similarly, the figures available for diesel oil engines and electric pumps for baling water, and for tractors in use, show a rapid increase over the last five to ten years.

Similarly, although the increase of rural cooperative credit societies over the last three decades is phenomenal, the credit they disburse amounts to only 3.1 per cent of the total borrowings. Loans from the Government constitute another 3.1 per cent, while the rest is from moneylenders, either agricultural or professional moneylenders.

The Rural Credit Survey of the Reserve Bank of India of 1951–52 concludes that most of the amount that is disbursed by cooperative societies reaches the large-scale cultivators, and that poor and medium cultivators have to depend mostly on landlords and professional moneylenders for credit.

The Government also issues loans for agricultural development. In the Andhra region the amount was about Rs 450,000 per year in the decade 1930–40, a sum that increased to about Rs 3,000,000 in 1941–51. During the last eight years, the Government has issued loans amounting to an average of Rs 1,000,000 per year.

It has not been possible to find out the shares that different categories of peasants received of these increased credit facilities. Even from the figures given above, it is clear that the cooperative movement in Telangana is far weaker than in the Andhra region: in 1957–58, while rural credit societies in Andhra disbursed loans worth Rs 75,000,000, rural societies in Telangana disbursed only Rs 9,850,000. Even in Andhra, in the Rayalaseema and other backward districts the cooperative movement is weak, compared to the deltaic districts of Godavari, Krishna, and Guntur.

It has not been possible in this article to study the tax and debt burdens on, and the market exploitation of, various categories of the peasantry.

Data on the Economics of Farming in Andhra Pradesh

I have attached certain tables to this article that show the productivity of labour in different broad economic belts in Andhra Pradesh: the rice belt; the millet red-soil belt; the millet black-soil belt; sugarcane areas; tobacco areas and the cotton belt (this last could not be worked on). These provide a broad and general picture of agrarian productivity, though there are, of course, various differences even within these broad belts.

My effort has been to show, on the basis of available material about Andhra Pradesh (the conditions in other States of India may quantitatively be different, but the general features and tendencies will hold good), that a rapid development of the capitalist form of exploitation, that is, employing wage labour, has occurred, and great differentiation among the peasantry has taken place. This capitalist mode of production in agriculture has not gone to the extent of large-scale use of modern agricultural machinery, nor has a big increase in productivity per labour unit throughout Andhra Pradesh taken place. Feudal forms of exploitation, especially usury and caste exploitation, continue, and the growth of agricultural labour and the poor peasantry at one end is quite a significant factor. As such, it becomes imperative for the democratic forces in India to lay primary stress and attention on the organisation of agricultural labour and poor peasants separately, and on taking up their demands and struggles and developing their movement, in order to strengthen and develop the democratic movement in India.

Editor’s note In the following tables, the author provides information on labour use and costs of cultivation of different crops in five different regions of Andhra Pradesh. He first deals with the economics of a 10-acre farm in villages of the deltaic rice-belt, with canal irrigation or guaranteed water supply from tanks, over three years. This material is presented in Farm Economics Tables 1 to 9. Farm Economics Table 3 specifies the three-year cycle that the farm follows:

Year/Season Season 1 (kharif) Season 2 (rabi) Year 1 Rice (10 acres) Rice (10 acres) Year 2 Rice (10 acres) Pulses (5 acres) and fodder crops (5 acres) Year 3 Rice (10 acres) Pulses (5 acres) and fodder crops (5 acres)

The author presents his calculations in three stages: In the first stage, he presents the net earnings from 10 acres of first-season (kharif) rice and two milch buffaloes. He then presents the income from 10 acres of first-season (kharif) rice and two milch buffaloes, and 10 acres of second-season (rabi) rice. In the third stage, the author presents the income from 10 acres of first-season (kharif) rice and two milch buffaloes, and 5 acres of pulses and 5 acres of fodder crops (the last two being grown in the second, or rabi, season). The author specifies that his computations do not include interest payments and taxes, “as these two come from surplus value.”

In this irrigated rice-belt area there are tracts where, with one plough-unit, one can cultivate only 5 acres. In such cases the pair of bullocks need not cost Rs 1,000, but may cost Rs 600; hence there need not be any great increase in the cost of cultivation. We have also assumed the gross average yield to be 15 bags per acre.

The existing daily wage rates in this belt are Re 0.75 to Re 1 in the weeding and slack seasons; (...) from Re 1 to Rs 1.50 for transplantation; and Rs 1.50 to Rs 2 in the harvesting and other busy and heavy seasons. An adult male farm servant is paid about 20 bags of paddy, i.e. Rs 400. A reasonable, fair wage, even allowing for a large measure of exploitation, should be Rs 1.50 in the lean season, and Rs 2 to Rs 3 in the transplanting and harvesting seasons.

Editor’s note In this section, the author presents the economics of a farm that comprises 1 acre of wet land and 10 acres of unirrigated land, in the region that he characterises as the “millet red-soil belt.” On such a farm, rice is cultivated on 1 acre of wet land, groundnut is cultivated on 2 acres of unirrigated land, millet is cultivated on 4 acres of unirrigated land, and pulses and castor seeds are cultivated on 2 acres of unirrigated land each. Millet and oilseeds are cultivated on red soils, and rice is cultivated under irrigation from wells and spring channels, supplemented with water from minor irrigation tanks. The author takes such a farm as typifying land-use in most parts of the districts of the Telangana region and a part of Rayalaseema. In the Farm Economics Tables below, we refer to such a farm as a “composite wet-dry farm.” The author also tells us that “in certain areas, two families cultivate their fields jointly, since (when the irrigation is from wells) it is more easy and feasible to cultivate jointly than for each family with one acre wet and 10 acres to cultivate separately.” These data are presented in Farm Economics Tables 10 to 17.

Groundnut seed-use per acre of land is 34 kg or 75 lb of unshelled groundnut, or 10 seers of shelled groundnut. The cost of seed is Rs 30 for 2 acres. Groundnut yield per acre is 650 lb or about 300 kg of unshelled groundnut. The cost of production is Rs 150. The value of crop cultivated on 2 acres of land is Rs 300.

With regard to seed, 5 kg per acre of millet seed are used for 4 acres, at a total cost of Rs 6. Millet yield is 2 bags or 200 kg per acre. The price of millet is Rs 30 per bag. The total value of millet is Rs 240.

Seed-use for pulses: 3 to 5 kg per acre of each pulse variety, at a total cost of Rs 7.50. Pulses yield 100 kg per acre of each variety of pulses sown. Total production is 400 kg. The price of pulses is Rs 50 per 100 kg. The total value of pulses is Rs 200.

Castor seed-use: 20 kg on 2 acres of land. The cost of seed is Rs 10. Castor yield is 150 kg per acre. Total production is 300 kg on 2 acres of land. The price of castor is Rs 50 per 100 kg. The total value of castor is Rs 150.

In certain places where the soil is better, instead of castor, groundnut itself is grown on this plot of 2 acres too.

The value of product per worker for 800 workers is Rs 1.50. The net yield of dry crops is Rs 80 per acre.

If the rice is cultivated with irrigation from tanks and not mainly from wells or spring channels, the work-days would be reduced by about 100 days, and to that extent the productivity of the work-day would increase. Even in this region, however, there are certain areas where millet yield is not 290 kg per acre but only 100 kg per acre, in which case the net income is reduced by Rs 120, and, to that extent, the value of the product of a work-day is also reduced by about Re 0.15 to Re 0.20.

In this region, in a peasant family that owns 1 acre of wet land and 10 acres of unirrigated land, a man, his wife, and even their children work throughout the year, and most of the labour expended on the farm is family labour. Only families that own more than this area employ wage labour.

A wage demand of Re 1 in lean seasons, and 5 kg (worth Rs 1.70) of paddy or millet (jowar) in the harvest and other busy seasons, seems quite justified in these areas.

Editor’s note In the statistical tables that follow (the data are presented in Farm Economics Tables 18 to 22), the author presents material on the economics of a 25-acre farm, in what he characterises as the “millet black-soil belt.” Three types of crops are grown here: millet on 12 acres, groundnut on 8 acres, and chillies on 4 acres of land. The discrepancy of 1 acre is in the original, an unusual case of the author leaving a piece of land unaccounted.

In certain areas, pulses, or a combination of pulses and chillies, are grown in place of single-cropped chillies. The net value of daily product does not vary much as a result of this variation in the general pattern. In certain other areas, instead of the 12 acres of millet and 8 acres of groundnut grown on the 25-acre farm described, farmers grow 6 acres of millet, 6 acres of groundnut, and 6 acres of country tobacco, in addition to pulses and other combinations of these varieties of crops. For growing country tobacco, 50 work-days per acre are necessary for various operations; no extra capital expenditure, such as expenditure on erecting barns for steaming tobacco (as in the case of Virginia tobacco), is necessary. An acre yields 750 lb and fetches a gross amount of about Rs 300 at Rs 200 per 500 lb. Wage-rates here are close to wage-rates in deltaic regions.

Editor’s note In the statistical tables below, the author presents material on the economics of a 10-acre farm, in what he characterises as the “sugarcane areas” of Andhra Pradesh. The land-use pattern is as follows: sugarcane is grown on 2.5 acres, rice on 2.5 acres, and pearl millet (bajra) or finger millet (ragi) on the remaining 5 acres of land. A variant of this, described in Farm Economics Table 30, is a farm in which sugarcane is grown on 2.5 acres and rice on 7.5 acres of land. These data are presented in Farm Economics Tables 23 to 30.

Sugarcane yield is 40 tons per acre, or a total production of 100 tons from 2.5 acres. The total production of jaggery is 2,500 lb. The price of jaggery is Rs 4 for 25 lb, or an income of Rs 4,000.

The total production is 10 bags of pearl millet (bajra) or finger millet (ragi) from 5 acres of land. The yield is 2 bags or 200 kg per acre. The price of millet is Rs 25 per bag. The total value of production is Rs 250.

The net income from pearl millet (bajra) or finger millet (ragi) cultivated on 5 acres of land is Rs 200.

There are other sugarcane areas in the deltaic region where the cropping pattern is sugarcane (2.5 acres) and paddy (7.5 acres). The net yield per acre of paddy in that region, after deducting all expenses, is Rs 300 to Rs 350. The number of work-days is 70 per acre (see the table below).

Editor’s note In the statistical tables below (Farm Economics Table 31 to 34), the author presents material on the economics of a 20-acre farm (in “tobacco areas”) on which 10 acres of Virginia tobacco and 10 acres of millet are grown.

An annual farm servant is paid Rs 250 to Rs 400 per year and three meals a day, which cost another Rs 200. The cost of 50 seers of seed is Rs 15. Manure and [and other inputs] cost Rs 35. The total expense is Rs 50.

Keywords: Rural Andhra Pradesh, agrarian relations, farming systems, costs of cultivation, rural labour, Census of India occupational categories, P. Sundarayya.