india's changing villages speech 100 words

Imagine you have to give a speech on the topic 'India's Changing Villages'. Write a speech on it in about 100 words.

India’s changing villages. india is a land of villages. it is said that real india lives in villages. about seventy per cent of its population lives in villages. india is undergoing revolutionary changes. its villages are not untouched by those changes. the changes are reflected in every walk of life. these changes have been brought by various agents. these include science, technology, and spread of education, advent of media in rural areas, industrialisation, urbanisation and migration. hence the lifestyle, attitude and thinking have changed greatly in rural india. in fact these factors have combined to change the ritualistic rural society into a dynamic society. once upon a time caste-based division has been prominently visible in rural india. but things are rapidly changing now. people do not care for any such distinction. there is an interdependence existence in society. there is a close interaction of people of different castes, creeds and religions, among them for various purposes. the outlook of the villagers has undergone sea change. they have begun to see things in broader context. this is a good sign..

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Imagine you have to give a speech on the topic 'India 's Changing Villages' . Write a speech on it in about 100 words.

"india's changing villages" the indian villages which comprise majority of the heart and soul of india, they provide her with agricultural products. today, thanks to many movements these villages have improved the education, housing, transport and communication. these villages if i may call them 'givers' are now receiving electricity and water irrigation systems, which in tum, has empowered them to give us more in return. but yet with all these changes we have only come along a small way. we must provide them with more of necessities, empower them to create an environ- ment of comfort and efficiency for themselves..

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The Changing Village in India: Insights from Longitudinal Research

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India has a long-standing tradition of village studies. Within this tradition, observation of the same village or villages over long periods of time has a special place, because it highlights the transformation of economic systems and social structures in rural areas. The essays in this volume examine the challenges and outcomes of such longitudinal research from a variety of angles. They address three broad themes: the first concerns the method and conceptual framework of longitudinal village studies; the second shows how wide and integrated accounts of particular villages can improve understanding of both economy and society; and the third explores particular topics in some detail, including production structures, land, labour, gender, and migration, within this broader framework. By bringing together these different contributions, the book aims to illustrate the range of analytical and policy issues that can be addressed in such long-term studies; highlights the problems and potentials of the longitudinal method; and encourages more work in this tradition.

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Thriving villages are key to India’s success

Lecturer in Journalism, Charles Sturt University

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Harry Dillon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Charles Sturt University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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In October 2011, the birth of an unidentified baby marked the seven billionth human. With more than 1.2 billion people and a world-leading national birth rate of about 50 per minute, India is more likely than any other country to have gestated Baby 7B. And given that about 70% of Indians – roughly one-tenth of humanity – live in the countryside, there’s a good chance 7B is among the new offspring in one of India’s 600,000-plus villages.

Rural India is a focal point for issues of global concern: the impacts of high population and development on natural resources; water pollution from raw sewage and pesticide runoff; soil loss and desertification due to erosion, overgrazing and deforestation.

India’s resilient rural villages are seeking to adapt to change and remain relevant without losing their valued traditions and skills. The ongoing viability of these villages is germinal to India’s current assumption of great power status.

With China, India is acquiring the prominent international position implied by its size, while contending with consequences such as the flow of poor peasants into already crowded urban centres. India’s burgeoning cities and towns will struggle to cope with the influx. There seems little prospect the incoming masses will acquire the jobs and financial security they seek. Already the cities have endemic shortages of employment, transport, housing, schooling, water, sewerage and health care.

The ability of India’s villages to offer fulfilling lives to their inhabitants will be a crucial safety valve on volatile social tensions in the future.

Australians must take a more concerted interest in learning about the rising nations and peoples with whom we share our part of the globe. China and India have been pillars of wealth and power from ancient times, when they dominated international trade and together accounted for five times as many people as Europe. From a long-term perspective, India has been much closer to civilisation’s centre of gravity than the West, which means the current trend of events marks a return to global normality.

Of course, the vision of mainland Asia’s global prominence as “natural” is hard to swallow for Westerners accustomed to thinking quite the opposite. In Australia, the difficulty is heightened by fears about restive hordes to our north that have long haunted our national consciousness.

The genuine, but seldom acknowledged, global importance of India’s villages impressed itself upon me during a recent trip to India organised through the Mumbai-based India Study Abroad Centre (ISAC) and Grassroutes . Their joint, three-week program immerses participants in the everyday activities of Purushwadi, an Indian village. The aim is to foster global citizenship through understanding of diverse lifestyles.

During the stay, our group of CSU students had close daily access to Purushwadi’s internal life. We lived just a few minutes’ walk from the centre of the village. Mealtimes brought us into the tiny domestic spaces: commonly just one or two small, low-ceilinged rooms with a little non-flued fireplace against a wall, where families store and prepare food, eat, sleep, dress and socialise.

Accustomed to images of India’s crowded poverty, I was unprepared for this attractive, undulating landscape dominated by rocky, treed hillocks and steep-sided river valleys. While walking on any quiet trail through the trees you are never far from productive activity and regularly meet low-key traffic: a man leading a cow, a woman picking berries, a group of people gathering firewood or carrying produce.

My time in Purushwadi yielded insights into why villages remain integral to Indian society, with their age-old ability to sustain most of the nation’s people peacefully and productively in inclusive, integrated communities.

More so than its cities, India’s villages are living repositories of ancient, diverse traditions that have survived down the ages through a combination of constancy and adaptation to changing circumstances. This resilience has enabled myriad village lifestyles to flourish in environments ranging from fecund, irrigated agricultural plains in India’s north and southeast to the vast, arid plains in its centre and the temperate mountain ranges of the east and west coasts.

As Stephen P. Huyler states in Village India , the financial poverty of village existence is offset by a wealth of communal customs, rituals and attitudes.

“Their faith and the interdependence of their societies provide a unity and sense of purpose rarely experienced in the contemporary West … Modernisation is essential but its most healthy expression would be a blending of traditional forms (and the wisdom gained through centuries of subtle adaptations to the environment) with innovative technologies.”

Respect for village life has a proud history. Gandhi decreed that the nation’s heart and soul was in its villages and that “If the villages perish, India will perish too”. Gandhi championed village life for its virtues of self-sufficiency, honesty, peacefulness and spirituality. Claiming the cities and towns were bleeding the life out of villages, he advocated an independent India comprised of ideal small communities with healthy living standards and access to the benefits of modern civilisation without the alienation inherent to industrial capitalism.

Gandhi’s vision of national, spiritual and social transformation based in the villages proved overly idealistic and was never implemented to any large extent by governments. No doubt the prospect of any such scheme coming to fruition is no more likely in today’s glossy new India, preoccupied with software start-ups, call centres, Bollywood starlets and consumer glitz.

However, Gandhi’s warning that India’s survival depends on the wellbeing of its villages seems even more pertinent today. India has no valid option but to protect the interests of its villages because they will remain important and highly populated for a long time to come.

India will almost certainly continue its march to the front rank of geopolitically significant nations while the majority of its swelling populace remains relatively poor. This scenario adds weight to the challenge of maintaining village viability in order to discourage the sons and daughters of India’s soil from abandoning the countryside in pursuit of urban-based, middle-class affluence.

The IT firms of Bangalore and similar businesses elsewhere in the country can absorb only small numbers of capable recruits. Other outlets will need to be found to accommodate a rising generation of village Indians who will be much better educated, ambitious and upwardly mobile than most of their parents. A squalid hand-to-mouth existence in the sprawling slums of Mumbai or Calcutta seems a dismal alternative to life in the countryside, but it’s an option already taken up by many escapees from rural poverty.

To the challenges facing India’s villages, no single response can suffice. When we asked the youngsters in Purushwadi about career goals, none mentioned subsistence farming; they wanted to become teachers, doctors, nurses, aid workers or similar. Most thought they would leave their village to gain qualifications, but return at some stage to help the community.

Most likely, the rising generation of India’s villages will seek to migrate to cities in unprecedented numbers to seek better lives. In some ways, this is a positive development in terms of the global environment: city dwellers can be supplied with housing, power, transport, food and water more efficiently than their country counterparts. As Mark Lynas argues in The God Species , urban sites occupy just 2.8% of the earth’s land, enabling about 3.3 billion people to live in an area less than half the size of Australia. Increased urbanisation is also linked with lower birth rates.

Even so, the cities of India and other developing countries are already struggling to cope with huge current populations. Unchecked mass migration from the countryside would trigger disaster. While India works towards better-managed cities, villages made as economically and culturally viable as possible will be a mainstay for future sustainability.

Assuming the world’s seven billionth living person is among the new crop of offspring in village India, where and how will he or she live? As a conventional village toiler, among the expanding middle classes in the city, or with a foot in both camps? Will his or her village solve or ignore problems, adapt to or resist changes, flourish or wither away? It’s certain that interesting times are ahead for 7B and village India overall, and that what happens there will affect us in an interconnected world facing a host of monumental challenges. We in the West must acknowledge that no place is truly remote in the 21st century global village.

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Documenting India's Villages Before They Vanish

The country's greatest chronicler of rural life embarks on a mission to digitize, well, everything.

NEW DELHI—When Palagummi Sainath was starting out as a young reporter in the 1980s, his news agency sent him into India’s heartland to collect the usual sob stories from farmers devastated by drought. Farmer after farmer explained to him that the disaster was not an accident of weather, but a man-made crisis caused by bad government policies. But when Sainath got back to Mumbai and read through the stories that he’d filed, he found that none of them captured what was happening on the ground. Relying on his training, he’d afforded undue weight to the narrative put forward by Indian officials. “That’s when I realized that conventional journalism is about the service of power,” he says today.

The epiphany shaped his career.

Frustrated by urban Indians’ headlong sprint to forget their rural roots following the liberalization of the country’s economy in 1991, Sainath applied for a journalism fellowship to travel through 10 rural districts in various Indian states and report on how the end of socialist-style planning, and the residue of its mistakes, was affecting India’s farms and villages. The senior journalists on the selection panel begged him to reconsider. The task was too big, and the budget too small, they warned. “‘You’ll be bankrupt after three districts,’ they told me. I was bankrupt after two,” Sainath recalled when I spoke with him by telephone last week from Princeton, where he is teaching this semester. Nevertheless, he kept going, selling cameras to stay afloat. “In the end, I did 19 districts. I covered more than 100,000 kilometers, much of it on foot.”

The result was a series of newspaper articles, later collected in book form under the title Everybody Loves a Good Drought (the title refers to a quote from a villager describing the way local bureaucrats and contractors line their pockets with government-relief packages). The reporting captured the complexity of rural poverty in India as a function of state policy and centuries-old social relationships—not in dry statistics but through engaging characters whom urban readers could recognize. When I searched out a copy a decade or so ago, it reminded me of James Agee’s Dust Bowl classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men . But Sainath’s style is less high-flown and his tone less earnest. He’s more like a world-weary cousin of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, as illustrated by a lengthy flight of fancy about all the brilliant progress India could make in eliminating its housing shortage if it redefined a sleeping bag as a house.

Now Sainath is at it again, leading an encyclopedic, volunteer-driven effort to digitize the faces, songs, arts, occupations, and struggles of India’s rapidly changing farms and villages. Called the People’s Archive of Rural India , or PARI, the project—in its ambition, at least—dwarfs Alan Lomax’s campaign to collect American blues and folk songs and James Murray’s crowdsourced Oxford English Dictionary. The website went live in December, featuring photographs, audio recordings, videos, and texts that document the celebrations and tribulations that make up “the everyday life of everyday people,” as Sainath puts it.

Among the goals: collect photographs of the faces of one man, one woman, and one child in every district of India; record speakers of all 780 Indian languages ; chronicle the story of India’s agrarian crisis; and gather in full text all official (and unofficial but credible) reports relating to rural India, so researchers will not have to scour badly designed government websites to access vital studies. Sainath wants the archive to be as much a weapon as a resource. It will document not only music and festivals but also the rural India that remains “ugly, obnoxious, and dehumanizing, and deserves to die—like untouchability and atrocities against women.”

A suave, erudite man with a disheveled mop of silver curls, Sainath is not the son of the soil I imagined when I first read Everybody Loves a Good Drought . He hails from neither the grain belt of Punjab nor the cotton belt of Maharashtra, but from Tamil Nadu in India’s deep south. Though he sometimes dresses like a jholawallah —a mildly disparaging term applied to India’s leftist activists—he speaks in the plummy, British-inflected accent that marks the Indian elite of his generation. He lives in the metropolis of Mumbai, though he claims to have spent an average of 270 days a year in Indian villages beginning in 1993. Since his first drought, he’s been fascinated by the resilience of India’s farmers and forest-dwellers.

“My generation has lost its connection to rural India,” Sainath, who’s 57, told me. “The generation that’s coming after us doesn’t even know that a connection existed. My grandmother’s generation knew that water came from rains, and they put out vessels to catch the rain. My generation grew up thinking that water came from a tap. Today’s generation thinks that water comes out of plastic bottles.”

So far, Sainath has recruited more than 1,000 volunteers for the archive project, ranging from 30-year veterans of the journalism business to software engineers who’ve nary written a word. They’ve documented some fascinating characters. One of them is a 73-year-old librarian who manages a trove of 170 classics, mostly translations of Russian masters, in a tiny forest village frequented by wild elephants. Another is a young folk dancer who overcame poverty and untouchability—the outlawed but still lingering practice of treating certain castes as “polluted” sub-humans—to win a spot at the country’s top institute for the classical Bharatanatyam form , which, after India’s independence in 1947, has become as much the domain of the elite as ballet is in the United States. Still another is a tribal bard , captured in spontaneous composition-performance of a song protesting the acquisition of his tribe’s ancestral lands by the South Korean steel giant POSCO.

But there are hundreds of thousands of miles yet to travel. Rural India is home to some 800 million people who speak hundreds of languages. Sainath reckons that he’s already spent between $30,000 and $40,000 on the nonprofit project since late 2012, drawing on journalism awards and prizes, along with his own money. But he says he’ll need around $240,000 over the next two years to fund sojourns in rural India by 70-odd “chroniclers.” Though he attracts 150 volunteers a week to do everything from writing articles to helping with back-end work, the quality of some of the content is spotty. And as with many other new-media ventures, it’s unclear whether sufficient thought has gone into the question of what the archive will be—a historical resource or an outlet for subaltern journalism—or how it will survive.

India is currently undergoing what Sainath calls “an extremely painful transformation.” The country’s 2011 census reflected one of the largest mass migrations in history—one that has swelled over the past decade. For the first time, the census recorded more population growth in cities than villages. But despite rapid economic growth in India, the shift bears more resemblance to the Joads leaving the Dust Bowl for California than the Great Migration of southern blacks to Chicago and Detroit. Indians are not so much leaving the countryside to seek better-paying jobs in the city, as they are fleeing increasing poverty resulting from the stagnation of agricultural growth, the rising cost of inputs like water and fertilizer, and a shortage of land. India’s landless agricultural laborers now outnumber landed farmers, and the average plot size of those who do own land is shrinking . Roughly three-quarters of India’s land-owning farmers now till less than two and a half acres of land, according to the latest report by India’s National Sample Survey Organization. They can hope to earn around $84 a month with that sized plot, but it costs them $96 a month to raise their crops, forcing small-scale farmers to take on other jobs to make ends meet. A lack of crop insurance, poor access to low-cost loans, and unpredictable rains—plus cultural pressure to shell out fat dowries and lavish weddings for their daughters—leave many farmers crippled by debt.

Some give up altogether. As many as 300,000 farmers have committed suicide over the past two decades. While statistics such as this, along with the causes behind them, are hotly contested , Sainath argues that the suicide rate among Indian farmers is 47-percent higher than the national average—and believes that the actual number of farmer suicides may be higher than reported. Countless indigenous tribal people, too, have lost their lands and cultures to dams, mines, and tiger reserves.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi sees this transformation as inevitable. Expressing scorn for programs like his predecessors’ rural-employment guarantee, which helped the poor survive but kept them on the farm, he has promised to create 300 million jobs in “industrial corridors” through schemes like “ Make in India ,” which reduces or removes caps on foreign investment in various business sectors. But critics like farm-policy analyst Devinder Sharma say desperation is pushing people out of the countryside far faster than industry can create jobs for them in cities and towns. Among the hot-button issues in India at the moment is an executive order by Modi that allows the government to force farmers to sell their land for infrastructure projects without seeking their consent.

“We have not created 300 million jobs over the past 67 years since independence,” Sharma told me, noting that only 8 percent of Indians work in the formal sector of the economy. “How can you create that number in five years?” he asked, referring to the Indian government’s term limit.

Technology, including the Internet-based sort at the heart of Sainath’s archive project, has both been blamed for causing India’s agrarian crisis and held up as a magical solution to farmers’ woes.

For example, hybrid wheat and rice sparked the Green Revolution that saved India from starvation in the 1960s—that is, until pesticides and chemical fertilizers depleted the soil and boosted cancer rates , according to activists like Vandana Shiva, a prominent advocate of organic farming. Banks and finance companies often grant farmers easy access to loans to buy tractors, whether or not the farmers own enough land to make a tractor pay for itself—to the point where Punjab villagers routinely take out a loan to buy an $8,000 tractor, only to flip it and buy a new car for their daughter’s dowry, according to Sharma. “One of the biggest reasons for farmer suicides is that we have loaded the farmer with unwanted technologies,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Indian Tobacco Company and various nonprofits have promoted Internet kiosks as a way to free farmers from rapacious middlemen by giving them direct access to market information. Companies like Reuters and Nokia have proposed mobile updates with weather reports and expert crop advice to increase farm output. Top banks and mobile-service providers have teamed up to offer financial services through rural Indians’ mobile phones in a bid to get hundreds of millions of people out of the moneylender system and into the banking system. And, in the latest silicon dream, Modi has proposed 100 technology-enabled “smart cities” to bring rural Indians out of the countryside altogether.

But none of these innovations has struck at the root of the problem, which is that farmers who increasingly till plots smaller than a football field cannot hope to earn a living wage. Still, Aditya Dev Sood at the Center for Knowledge Societies told me that mobile- and Internet-based technologies have increased rural incomes and had more radical sociological effects. Interconnectivity with the outside world is eroding the “closed social networks” of the village that have fostered the ghettoization of Muslims and untouchables. “I’m willing to hazard that within my lifetime we’re going to see that change utterly,” he said.

Sainath—whose archive project lies somewhere between these dystopian and utopian visions—is not so sure. One moment he’s enthusiastically relating an anecdote about a taxi driver in the city of Raipur who hailed from a Punjab village and found Sainath’s project so interesting that he posted about it on Facebook using his mobile phone. The next he’s expressing reservations about the growing monopolization of the web, which in India has recently taken the form of companies like Facebook and Flipkart (an Indian competitor to Amazon) teaming up with mobile companies to offer free Internet access—a move that some see as a threat to net neutrality.

Peasants and small landholders have historically resisted being documented in archives, Sainath notes, since they recognize that being measured and recorded may be the first step to being dispossessed. Recently, for instance, slum dwellers prevented the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board from conducting a survey of 33 out of 622 slum clusters slated for “resettlement” in low-income housing. And governments have often found reasons to censor or restrict access to the archives they control. Today’s India is no different , Sainath says.

Sainath’s project accepts no government funding or corporate sponsorship. And unlike a magazine or TV station, it grants primary credit for all its material to the people who are depicted in the archive rather than the writers or filmmakers who document them, in addition to training and encouraging “subjects” to take pictures and make films themselves. In other words, control over information related to rural people is taken out of the hands of governments and corporations.

“Ours is a people’s archive,” Sainath said. “It can’t lead to dispossession. Nobody can take it down or make it their own.” Yet the archive’s very reason for existence is the rapid dispossession of the people it seeks to celebrate and defend. And even if nobody can take down the site, the archivists may struggle to avoid sinking into oblivion amid the cacophony of the Internet, which itself operates at the whim of governments and corporations.

Sainath is optimistic about what the archive could become. “We want that parents will show this to their kids. We want schools to use it in their courses,” he said. But he also concedes the challenge ahead. “The site is gigantic,” he noted, “and we are few.”

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Prof. Jodhka: ‘Colonial powers produced theories of society that placed Europe at the centre of their experience and others had to follow’

Civil Society News, Gurugram

Stimulating rural areas should be part of any script for economic growth in India. Even as younger generations seek to move on, agriculture deserves to be made more rewarding and sustainable and linked to national strategies for better nutrition. Much value awaits to be unlocked by promoting livelihoods aligned to agriculture.

Getting people off the land and out of agriculture has been shown up as being easier said than done — especially when those in rural areas account for 70 percent of the country’s population. There aren’t the cities to absorb them efficiently or the industries to provide jobs.

But a robust vision of villages begins with an understanding of what they are all about. It means going beyond the entrenched view of a rural-urban divide. Among many deleterious consequences, it has led to rural areas being environmentally exploited to serve the cause of development. Escaping from such regression is not just costly, but is mostly impossible.

So much better to see rural and urban as being interconnected in a single mosaic, transforming and prospering in tandem and to a collective advantage. Surinder S. Jodhka’s book, The Indian Village: Rural Lives in the 21st Century, encourages such fresh thinking.

Prof. Jodhka teaches sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is  a scholar and researcher who travels extensively in rural India. His book puts many myths to rest.

Villages have never been static, he argues. Historically villages and cities were dynamic, globally connected and not backward. They have been changing and continue to do so. The city-village binary is therefore a false one thrust upon the Global South by European colonizers to assert their worldview. Civil Society spoke to Prof. Jodhka about his book and his understanding of rural India’s aspirations based on his research. An edited version of our conversation:

Q: You have said in your book that colonial powers deliberately, to a strategy, as it were, portrayed villages as being static and backward whereas cities were positioned as being forward-looking and symbols of development. Could you explain this a little?

There were many things happening at that time. With the development of capitalism in Europe and colonization of the rest of the world, Europe, in some sense, took charge of defining the world. It built narratives of what is good, what is bad, what is the future, what is the past, what is Europe and what is the rest.

India was colonized by Europe along with many countries of the Global South. The colonial powers produced theories of society which placed Europe in an advantageous position, as a region that had already developed and the rest of the world had to follow. Social theories were constructed with Europe as the centre of their experience. And then they treated all this as history.

Well, the fact is that before the 17th and 18th centuries, when Europe underwent the Industrial Revolution, the world existed in different forms. And Europe was not really ahead of other regions. China, India, the Middle East and many other regions were very advanced civilizations with a lot of wealth.

Colonial powers came to India for its wealth, which they wanted to acquire. Most of the riches of India were not being generated in Bangalore or in Hyderabad. They were being generated in villages. Just take spices as one example.

But, according to the narratives of the capitalist bourgeoisie, created by the Industrial Revolution, cities were sites of production. Orientalism, attached with the white man’s burden, generated narratives that the Global South — India, China and Africa — consisted of primitive places or traditional societies and cultures which didn’t have the capability of growing on their own.

So India got conceptualized as a land of villages, as if there were no cities here. The Indian village was shown to be kind of stuck in time and incapable of growing on its own. It needed to be disintegrated and connected with the city.

Our own nationalists bought these theories. They were mostly urban, middle-class Indians who kind of replaced the colonial elite. They felt that they now had the responsibility of developing everyone else. They regarded themselves as knowing everything because they were ‘educated’ and others were illiterate and living in primitive times or less developed.

Well, the reality is that the world was always integrated in some way or the other. And so were villages. It didn’t happen in the 21st century. Population flows were always there. There were kinship connections, people travelled from villages to cities and beyond.

Cities flourished in India. There was Agra, Delhi, Jodhpur, Jaipur, Jalandhar, Amritsar. Every 100 miles there was a city, these were also centres of culture, villages were closely integrated, there were pilgrimage centres. Populations were always mobile. Obviously, there were poor people. There have always been poor people in cities.

Q: In fact, as you say in your book, at one point, India had more people living in urban spaces than Europe had, right? So, in a sense, India was more advanced. Remnants of efficient urban systems are proof. But this was not asserted, taken forward. Why?

The urban middle class began to see itself in a ‘we-know-it-all’ kind of category, that we know what is good for you. That’s what provoked me into writing this book. I started thinking about it in 2020, when farmers were sitting on the borders of Delhi. They were speaking a very cosmopolitan language. They were talking about the entire world. They were talking about the dynamics of corporate capital. They were talking about their own internal livelihood patterns and what would happen once corporations came in.

On the other hand, middle-class Indians were condescending. They had no idea what these farm laws were. People were not even looking at the texts. They were just passing judgement publicly on television channels and amongst themselves that farmers have gheraoed us and they don’t understand anything.

When I went to the farmer protests, I saw they were holding classes. They had set up libraries on the borders. They were talking about not just their agriculture, but about the world, about jurisprudence, how global flows would function after 50 years and what is happening to infrastructure. They were very sophisticated and very knowledgeable.Urban folks just assume that they know better. Privilege is hard to shed.

Q: You’ve been travelling to villages in Punjab and across the cow belt. Villages must have evolved over time?    

We now have plenty of historical work. And I have a whole chapter on this in the book which talks about actually existing villages. All these agrarian economies were constantly under transformation. You know, there were surpluses being produced. Villages were connected to cities and villages were connected to the world. There was a process of change happening all the time.

There were new communities coming in. For example, in northwest India, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan you have flows of Jats coming in.  South India was undergoing a complete change. You have canal irrigation coming in. New technologies and new crops. Potatoes, tomatoes perhaps from Brazil, Latin America. New kinds of spices too.

These were not localized economies. They were integrated into the larger world. Things were going from here to elsewhere and coming from elsewhere to here. Villages were always changing in every sense of the term.

If you look at power hierarchies, once you have new land and new systems, new rulers come, there’s a drought, people will move from one place to the other, just for the sake of livelihood. Then they have to negotiate with a new terrain. So, villages were always changing.

Secondly, in the past 100 years, particularly after Independence, villages were integrated into the systems of the nation state and democratic politics. We didn’t have that earlier. That makes a lot of difference because with democratic politics you have a representational system which didn’t exist before.

We have people voting. Votes made a lot of difference even to people who were completely marginalized whether it was in the cow belt or Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand or down South or the interiors of northeast India. There was a process of national integration in a very political sense of the term.

A new bureaucracy comes in, a developmental bureaucracy, with development programmes and electoral processes. The Green Revolution brings in a certain kind of development in some pockets. The Green Revolution was not confined to Punjab, Haryana or Western UP or parts of Gujarat and Tamil Nadu.

You also have population flows. In the 1970s itself, labour begins to migrate from Bihar to Punjab. I have done field work in Bihar. You go to Madhubani district and villagers will tell you that when they began to migrate for work to Punjab they felt liberated — they were not dependent on the local landlords anymore. It gave them alternative possibilities of livelihood.

And then you have the rise of OBC politics. It played a very significant role in creating further democratic aspirations. People began to go wherever employment was available. You have taxi drivers from Punjab working in Calcutta or Bombay, early on. Security guards from all over the country. And tribal labour migrating.

But along with migration flows, there are commodity flows and a new kind of consumption culture. Take ATMs which play an important role in the lives of migrant labour and their families. Or mobile phones — you can stay in the village and work in the city. If you are, say, an electrician you don’t have to stay in a slum if your village is 10 km away.

Rural livelihoods have changed. Agriculture does not give livelihoods to more than 15 to 40 percent of rural households across the country. The remaining livelihoods come from the non-farm economy, a very generic term.

Democratic politics has played a very important role. It has produced a new local elite, which is connected, knowledgeable and linked to the developmental bureaucracy. It also then produces a kind of clientele politics where the regional political elite also develops connections with the village and forms an electoral constituency.

People don’t vote on the basis of caste identities alone. Caste is also an urban process, right? These identities are being mobilized from cities, and then you have associational formations of caste. We think of caste as a village reality. But villages also get integrated through those new caste elites, which are actually elites of our modern-day democracy.

Q: You point out in your book that the rural population has actually increased. This is contrary to what economists find desirable. Can you explain this?

Economists know this. In India, we obviously have many more people living in urban areas now than we did 100 years back. The proportion of the urban population has gone up from, say, around 10 to 11 percent in the early 20th century to perhaps 35 to 37 percent — we don’t have figures of the last Census. It’s only in relative terms that the urban population has increased. It’s still very large. I mean, India’s urban population is more than the total population of any country in the world other than India and China, right? We have nearly 400 million people living in India’s urban centres, which is larger than the total population of the United States.

But the rural population has also increased to nearly four times what it was 100 years ago. So, the absolute size of the rural population is perhaps, you know, 850 to 900 million people living in rural areas, which is obviously more than double the urban population of India.  It’s a huge number.

That’s why I keep emphasizing, look at the facts, at the ground realities. Unless you are constantly engaging with those, you will end up producing narratives and prescriptions. Not only do such narratives not work, they also create problems. They create more inequalities. We unnecessarily lose out on skills that are there in this large 70 percent of our population.

We don’t consider them worth anything. We think they’re a lag on us, the urban middle class, because we pay taxes and they don’t. Everyone pays taxes indirectly, right? They are part of the consumer economy. Also, they’re skilled people. They are knowledgeable. You need to visualize your population demographics very differently, more regionally.

Q: With connectivity, migration, Panchayati Raj, surely caste equations must have undergone change in villages? Don’t women have more agency with Panchayati Raj?

Absolutely. Caste equations have changed but caste has not disappeared. Earlier structures of hierarchy that integrated everyone are not required any longer. Rural economies are quite mechanized. People are quite mobile. Agriculture doesn’t need too many people. And not too many people work in agriculture any longer.

In some contexts, women have agency, but mostly it is nominal. It is a complicated question. My own theory is that women have been given reservations in panchayats because the erstwhile dominant sections of the village have moved out so they don’t have too much stake in rural panchayats.

Panchayats have become delivery systems of state-led development. They are not the kind of panchayats that Gandhi had visualized. These are more like bureaucratic channels to disperse developmental schemes.

That kind of representation is required but the structure of relations needs to change. There is very little discussion in villages on patriarchy, on male dominance. It varies from region to region. So Kerala is very different from Gujarat which is different from western UP. They also vary vertically. Dalit communities have a different kind of patriarchal arrangement or structure from, say, the Jats or Rajputs.

Take what happens to rural families when men move out. If you go to a village in Bihar, 75 percent of households have at least one to four persons working outside. And most of these men are actually married. Their wives stay back and run the household. What kind of empowerment does that bring to women there? Obviously, things are changing when men are not around.

Earlier, it used to be only in Kerala when men went to the Gulf. Those dynamics are also interesting. Empirically, there are varieties of processes across social stratum. We need to map those and that can happen only by taking the village seriously. 

Q: We have also had NGOs working in Rajasthan, MP, and UP telling us very bitterly that governments have deliberately not spent on rural infrastructure across the cow belt to force distress migration. How far is this true? 

Absolutely true. Both infrastructure and also in imagining rural livelihoods. Post the 1990s everything is led by corporate interests. If companies like some areas to be developed, it happens. Companies are also willing to develop infrastructure, storage facilities, provided you hand over agrarian economies to them. In parts of South India, agriculture is very well integrated because farming interests have shrunk.

I went to do field work in Bihar and travelled from Patna to Madhubani. This is a wonderful place. I mean, agriculturally this land in the Gangetic plains is one of the most fertile in the world. But there is no infrastructure and no irrigation.

There is water, it causes floods, but there’s no canalization. And it did not happen partly because the dominant agrarian interests did not want development in Bihar. And after that there was simply State neglect.

Who is going to develop this kind of infrastructure in Bihar? These are all small holdings. Why should you invest in developing irrigational networks? There is no thinking, no investment, in such regions. And agrarian plans have to be region-specific, ecology-sensitive.

Q: Why has rural India lost political heft?

Historically and sociologically, in the 1970s and post the 1980s, the local rural elite, because of democracy and the new Green Revolution technology, became prosperous. They used those channels of mobility to move out of the village. They sent their children to schools and colleges. The aspirations of their children changed. Some became MLAs or got into other political positions, which took them out of the village to the local capital city.

Even in Jharkhand you will find half the population in urban areas are new migrants from villages. Some would be poor, but many would be the erstwhile rural elite. So who will speak for the village in a loud enough voice to be heard in Parliament? You don’t have a Charan Singh or a Devi Lal any longer. You have farmer lobbies only in regions like Punjab which had relatively larger holdings.

In some sense, land reforms also made agriculture a politically unviable voice. The farmer lobby, farmer movements were very active in the 1980s. After that their children began to move out and diversified into urban occupations.

With new liberal development, the middle class began to reproduce itself in the urban corporate economy. Earlier, the Nehruvian middle class still felt it had the onus of taking everyone along. But that is not ‘in’ anymore. Villages have become unfashionable, even for academics like us. They think it is a waste of time. Why do you want to study villages, they ask, who reads about villages these days? ν  

Gauri - Dec. 15, 2023, 9:37 a.m.

I found this interview particularly insightful. The sad reality as Prof. Jodhka put it is - 'earlier, the Nehruvian middle class still felt it had the onus of taking everyone along. But that is not ‘in’ anymore.' As a country this is shameful to say the least. Villages are the roots of any society, intrinsic to the social fabric of India.

Naresh Kumar - Dec. 6, 2023, 10:27 a.m.

Thank you Prof Prof. Jodhka, I like your thought on rural economy, sociology and politics. The conversation highlighted a true picture - how rural India has been narrated by external socio-political thinkers and capitalists. Being part of the rural folk I completely agree with his thought of rural governance and panchayat system as well. Its a completely new insight about how migration works as a liberation for Bihar youth. Thanks again for very sound thoughts with a new perspective. We need more voices and narratives around this.

Kanchan Mondal - Dec. 3, 2023, 8:15 a.m.

It is a thought provoking interview.

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English Grammar For You By Darekar Sir

englishgrammarforyoubydarekarsir

Wednesday 31 January 2018

Speech on the topic ‘india’s changing villages'(march 2016), no comments:, post a comment, second term exam 2020.

SECOND TERM EXAMINATION -MARCH 2020 STD: XI SUBJECT: ENGLISH TIME: 3 HOURS   MARKS: 80 MARKS SECTION I – PROSE (Reading...

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It takes a village: the Indian farmers who built a wall against drought

In rural Rajasthan, villagers have taken action against climate damage by constructing water-saving walls, trenches and dams to revive their farmland

T he villagers of Surajpura have built a wall: a 15ft (4.5 metre) mud bulwark that snakes through barren land for nearly a mile, with an equally long trench dug beneath it. It might not look like it, but for the 650 residents who toiled on it for six months in 2022, it is an architectural marvel.

The wall passed its strength test last year when it stopped rainwater runoffs, and the trench channelled the water to parched farms in the drought-prone region of Rajasthan in north-west India , reviving them for the first time in more than two decades.

Since then, Surajpura’s residents have seen their farms come back to life, their wells refilled and the land become alive once more with migratory birds. Villagers who had left to find work have also returned to their farms.

“Our village received good rainfall until about 20 years ago” says Hemraj Sharma, standing in the middle of his lush wheat crop fed by water from a nearby well, clean enough to drink. “But major droughts and poor rain led to our wells drying up. Our farm yields hit zero. We had just one harvest cycle for years.”

“We see a drought once every three years. Last year was a drought year, too, but this time around we had water. The wall worked,” says Sharma, who worked in a textile mill in neighbouring Bhilwara city until a few years ago. The water scarcity had also led his brothers to migrate to the city, where, like him, they worked 12-hour shifts for 5,000 rupees (£50) a month.

Sharma had feared that he would lose his farmland to the climate emergency, before the entire village came together to avert the crisis. “More than 40 of the 100 wells in the village have water now,” he says.

R ajasthan, India’s largest state, is among the most vulnerable to droughts, with 98% of its 250 village blocks in sectors marked as “dark zones” – areas with dangerously low groundwater levels – and almost 7% of the land uncultivable, according to Shantanu Sinha Roy, the Rajasthan head of the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), a land conservation organisation.

More than half of the world’s major aquifers are being depleted faster than they can be naturally replenished, the United Nations warned last year, and India is among the countries most at risk of groundwater plummeting to levels that existing wells cannot access.

In Surajpura, while rain is scarce in the sowing months of July to October, unseasonal rainfall in winter damages standing crops. Worse, the village’s poor soil quality prevents water soaking through.

For climate advocates, Surajpura’s wall is a case study in climate resilience. It was built as part of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA), a government-run social welfare policy and one of the world’s biggest job programmes. The scheme guarantees 100 days of manual labour a year to rural households that request it, and has been credited with cushioning some of the country’s poorest communities from the devastating blow of droughts and floods in the past years, as well as during the Covid-19 pandemic. But now, climate activists are increasingly citing its role in building water security in villages, amid growing climate uncertainties.

“The scheme should no longer be viewed as an instrument solely for job creation,” says Roy . “It is a climate action tool. It is the only way to protect our future.”

Surajpura is not the only community in the region that is tackling water scarcity with the help of the MGNREGA scheme. In Baldarkha village, about 10km (6 miles) from Surajpura, villagers dug contours and trenches across 8 acres (3 hectares) of barren land about three years ago turning it into a fertile grazing field for their animals – even when the ponds dried up after no rainfall last year.

In Makarya village, home to about 500 people and about 120km from Surajpura, the villagers have created another pastureland spread over 50 acres. They dug trenches and check dams on the wasteland to stop rainwater runoff and planted medicinal herbs and local tree species . The revived land has inspired a neighbouring village to utilise its wasteland in a similar fashion.

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However, there are some concerns about the scheme. Researchers say that its budgetary allocations have fallen over the past three years and its new digital system – whereby a supervisor logs attendance on a smartphone – is a stumbling block in villages with bad network, exacerbating payment delays that have affected job creation and demand.

The government has denied poor funding and says MGNREGA is a demand-driven programme , which has been granted additional funds in the past three years.

B ack in Surajpura, the wheat crop sways in the breeze as villagers gather to tell the story of the wall they built. Among them is Sayari Kumavat, 50, a farmer. “I worked very hard on it,” she says. “I did get paid for each day’s labour but I also volunteered to work for free. This was going to benefit the village and me. I got water in my well.”

More rainwater seeping into the earth has recharged aquifers and improved groundwater quality, which means women in the village no longer have to make a four-hour trek to fetch water from a distant well.

Last year, the village welcomed back painted storks, migratory birds that had disappeared years ago. Several men who had moved to work in Bhilwara’s textile mills or to dig borewells in other states also returned.

Mahavir Jat, 28, worked in Jammu for six years, earning 10,000 rupees a month digging borewells. He now leases a farm and rears two buffaloes, earning 3,000 rupees a day from selling their milk. “I don’t see the need to migrate now,” he says.

Surajpura village council head, Ramlal Jat, a trained lawyer who led the wall project, says nearly 60% of the people who migrated from the village have returned. “People are investing in animals, since water and fodder are now available. We want to revive agriculture-linked livelihoods in our village.”

He is now seeking funds to strengthen the wall.

Meanwhile, farmers like Sharma have found a rare calm in their fields and a feeling of optimism. He plucks a carrot from a friend’s farm and chews on it as he speaks about the 50 quintals of wheat he reaped on his three-acre farm, the first such yield in more than two decades.

“ Gajab hariyali hai (it’s amazingly green),” he says.

• Climate crisis
• South and central Asia

PM spells out vision for Independent India@100

In his speech, the PM focused on the past, present and the future.

In a speech that began with an acknowledgment of the contribution of India’s freedom fighters including Jawaharlal Nehru, outlined recent steps India had taken to ensure the “ease of living” and “ease of doing business”, highlighted current governance challenges including the pandemic and the climate crisis, and laid out a future vision for India at 100 in 2047, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that no obstacle could stop the country from achieving its dreams in the 21st century and declared that India now has the political will to undertake major reforms. Importantly, he said everyone has to do their bit to achieve all this, adding “sabka prayas” (everyone’s effort) to his government’s slogan.

Addressing the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort on India’s 75th Independence Day, PM Modi unveiled a national blueprint with limited State interference in the everyday life of citizens; a focus on small farmers and rural economy; energy independence with the announcement of a National Hydrogen Mission; a boost to manufacturing, technology, infrastructure and start-ups; employment generation for the young with a ₹ 100 lakh crore PM Gati Shakti master plan; equity for women and vulnerable sections of society; and balanced regional development with a focus on Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh and the Northeast.

In a reference to national security challenges from Pakistan and China, without naming the two countries, the PM underlined India’s battle against “terrorism” and “expansionism” and said the country would do all it needed to strengthen the armed forces. He did not, however, mention the evolving situation in Afghanistan, where the Taliban reached the gates of Kabul on Sunday, after a successful military offensive across the country.

India’s Olympic contingent was present at the Red Fort, with PM Modi hailing the success of Indian athletes — with seven medals across six sports, India had its most successful run in Tokyo this year.

The Opposition has criticised the speech, with the Congress accusing him of only making announcements about schemes in his Independence Day speeches and not implementing them. “He announces new schemes but these are never implemented or seen on the ground. He says a lot of things but never adheres to them,” senior Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge told reporters.

The Congress also took a swipe at the PM for his announcement of ₹ 100 lakh crore for the infrastructure sector, saying he has been talking of it since 2019. “It has been two years since August 15, 2019. At least, the 100 lakh crore figure could have been changed,” Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said in a tweet.

Looking back, he hailed the contribution of a range of freedom fighters from across different strands (both non-violent and revolutionary) of the national movement, spoke of India’s struggle for the “motherland, culture and freedom”, and reiterated that August 14 would be henceforth marked as the Partition Horrors Remembrance Day. “It was one of the biggest tragedies of the last century and the memories of the pain persist… people went through inhuman times... and many didn’t even get a proper farewell. It is important for them to be alive in our memories.” The government’s announcement to this effect on Saturday triggered a mixed response, with many hailing it as a much-needed effort at acknowledging the past while others criticising it for reopening old wounds which may aggravate the politics of division.

Turning to the present, the PM spoke of the Covid-19 pandemic as a huge challenge, hailed Corona warriors for their contribution, and highlighted India’s vaccination programme, the world’s largest such exercise. “India doesn’t need to be dependent on others for vaccines. Imagine what would have happened if India didn’t have its own vaccine? Where would we have got it?” While both Covishield and Covaxin are manufactured in India (the latter has also been developed in India), the government has come under criticism for not ensuring timely clearance to foreign-made vaccines which would have helped meet the supply deficit.

But the PM also acknowledged the scale of the devastation without directly referring to the second wave this summer, which saw daily cases climb up to over 400,000 and deaths cross 4,000 — widely seen by experts as a conservative estimate. “It is true that fewer people in India have got infected, that we have succeeded in saving more people in terms of population ratio compared to other countries. But to say that we didn’t face challenges would be to close doors for development in the future. We have fewer resources, our population is higher, our lifestyle is different. Despite all our efforts, we couldn’t save many people and this intolerable pain will stay with us.”

A large part of the PM’s speech was focused on welfare delivery, justice for vulnerable segments and steps undertaken for rural economy and farmers.

While outlining the various welfare measures in the past seven years — for instance, provision of gas cylinders through the Ujjwala scheme, rural roads and housing, toilets, electrification, health insurance through Ayushman Bharat, and financial inclusion — the PM said it was now time to move towards saturation coverage. “The pace of government schemes has increased, they are meeting their targets, the poor are benefiting directly now. But we now need to move towards 100% coverage.”

The PM made it clear — at a time when the debate on reservations, caste census, and categorisation of Other Backward Classes (OBCs) has made its way back in political discourse — that there had to be “handholding” of the marginalised. Beyond facilities, this meant continued reservations for Dalits, tribals, OBCs and poor of general categories.

He also spoke of the need for development to be all-inclusive and all-encompassing, touching all regions. “India’s east, Northeast, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Himalayan region states, coastal areas, the tribal belt will become the basis of India’s development in the future.” The PM said there has been balanced regional development in both Jammu and Kashmir after the effective abrogation of Article 370 and referred to the establishment of the delimitation commission and plans to hold assembly elections; spoke of Ladakh’s development potential; highlighted the enhanced connectivity in the Northeast and between the Northeast and India’s neighbours to the east; and focused on improved development indicators in 110 aspirational districts.

In terms of the rural economy, the PM spoke of enhanced facilities and connectivity in villages giving rise to digital entrepreneurs, the value of cooperatives in the backdrop of the formation of a separate ministry of cooperation at the Centre (led by Amit Shah), and the role of self-help groups, announcing a new e-commerce platform to enable such groups to market and sell their products elsewhere.

But the PM’s focus was on agriculture — in the context of prolonged opposition to the new farm laws pushed by the Centre last year. The PM spoke of the need to incorporate scientific feedback to enhance production, and why India must frame policies keeping in view the interests of small farmers, even coining a new slogan of how small farmers are the “pride of India”. “80% of India’s farmers own less than 2 hectares of land each; there is increased fragmentation of land. Past policies did not prioritise these farmers. Agricultural reforms are meant to benefit these farmers”. The PM highlighted the government’s insurance scheme, Kisan credit card, farmers producers organisation, construction of warehouses at the block level, the PM-Kisan scheme under which farmers get an income assistance of ₹ 6000 each annually, Kisan rail links, and steps to boost export potential of agriculture as evidence of a shift in policy.

But along with this, with an eye on the future, the PM also flagged the role of sectors which are essential for India’s future development trajectory — “next generation infrastructure... world class manufacturing... cutting edge technology... new age technology”.

In this context, he referred to Make in India (singling out electronics manufacturing and indigenous defence production as successes), the role of infrastructure (with a focus on the ₹ 100 lakh crore national infrastructure pipeline), the success of startups (with a reference to how they are the new “wealth creators”, with many have turned into unicorns of a valuation in excess of $1 billion), and exports (with an appeal to Indian exporters to focus on quality with an eye on global markets). “Major reforms and decisions need political will. And in India, there is no shortage of political will. The world knows we are writing a new chapter of governance”.

Redefining the idea of next generation reforms, the PM focused on the need to make service delivery more accessible for citizens till the last mile. “Earlier, the government was in the driving seat. Now, times have changed. We must end the unnecessary interference of the government and government processes in the lives of citizens. We have liberated people from unnecessary laws... 15,000 compliance requirements were ended... Liberation from laws is good for both ease of living and ease of doing businesses.”

The PM also spoke of the role of education, in light of the New Education Policy, with a focus on how education in one’s mother tongue is a weapon in the fight against poverty and need not be an obstacle. Taking off from the success of women athletes in the Tokyo Olympics, the PM highlighted how women were excelling in each field and ready to take their space and it was the duty of citizens, police, the criminal justice system and all stakeholders to ensure women were secure and had respect. He also announced that Sainik schools will now be open for girls too.

With climate emerging as a key governance challenge — with new warnings about how the climate crisis is already straining environment and will have huge implications for India’s political economy and livelihoods — the PM said environmental security was now a part of national security.

He said that India was an energy dependent nation, spending ₹ 12 lakh crore for its energy needs every year — and declared a goal of making India energy independent by the 100th year of Indian independence. The PM also announced the launch of a National Hydrogen Mission, a mission circular economy, and highlighted attempts in areas of recycling, organic farming, energy conservation, protection of wildlife and increase of forest cover, renewables.

“India is changing... it can take difficult decisions and doesn’t hesitate,” said PM Modi, referring to the decisions on Article 370, the rollout of the Goods and Services Tax, implementation of one-rank-one-pension, peaceful resolution of the Ram Janmabhoomi dispute, constitutional status to the backwards commission, district elections in Kashmir, record foreign direct investment , and surgical and air strikes across the border.

• Pm Modi Independence Day Speech

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