The emergence of capitalist agriculture in India

Abstract

In every major region of India today there is a boom in capitalist agriculture. Several years of sustained high prices for food grains have made investment in the production of high yielding varieties of paddy, wheat, maize and millet extraordinarily remunerative. Tube wells, electric pump sets, tractors, bags of fertilizers pesticides and weed killers provide visible evidence of the new style of farming which already covers a significant fraction of the land under cultivation. It is not only villagers of means who have begun applying modern methods on sizeable units of land. We are witnessing a veritable rush to the countryside of city folk eager to sink substantial suns into the soil. The development of a technologically advanced, profit-oriented sector in village agriculture is a very recent phenomenon. In the years down to 1947 large landholders contented themselves, for the most part, with giving out small parcels on one or another kind of tenancy, even where the fields were titled by laborers, the relations between masters and servants followed traditional patterns and the cultivation was carried on according to traditional methods. The rarest type to come across in the Indian countryside in the days before independence was a genuine capitalist producer who worked his land with hired labor to produce crops for sale at a profit and reinvested his gains in intensifying production or enlarging the scale.