From Village to City: the Migration of India’s Farmers

by James Cassidy Sterling

At the current rate of migration, one quarter of India’s population will have moved from rural regions to cities within the next ten years.

Traveling a hundred kilometres from the outskirts of any city in India is like stepping back in time. Small fields and tiny herds of goats, cows, or water buffalo, each with its own shepherd, replace the noisy congestion of the cities. It seems that nothing has ever changed or ever will. Seventy percent of Indians still live in rural villages, but, as in many countries whose people rely on village structure and non-industrialized, labour intensive agriculture, the traditional lifestyle is being undercut by forces over which the local people have little or no control.

Water and other agricultural inputs have become cash commodities in the new economy. My friend Ramesh had asked me to photograph him with a water buffalo cow that he was about to sell. ‘I can’t keep her any longer,’ he told me. ‘We have not enough water to keep cows. There is no well on our land and purchasing of water it is too much money.’ But he was fond of his cow and wanted a photograph by which to remember her. ‘Don’t coming too close, sir,’ he warned me. ‘Until now she was never going away from home before and she is a little scary.’

With some irritation, Nandish, one of Ramesh’s friends, filled me in on the details. ‘You can hear him crying at night,’ he said, ‘It makes me angry. It’s stupid! None of us can live like our grandfathers were living. Things are changing and we have to also change and learn new ways.’

Ramesh and Nandish both come from village backgrounds but now earn money in jobs based on the global economy. Nandish has had to turn his face to a new way of life. He sends all his money home to save for his sisters’ dowries and refuses the self-indulgence of regret.

Village economies are disintegrating all over India. Rural people, faced with the collapse of their traditional way of life, seek jobs in cities. In some places entire villages have put their land up for sale and departed for the city en masse. As these villagers are forced to adapt to an unfamiliar urban lifestyle for which they have no skills or education, some fall into despair.

But why are village economies failing in such large numbers? Population growth alone doesn’t explain it because the same phenomenon can be found in virtually all underdeveloped regions of the world, including much of Latin America and even in the poorer regions of the United States, where population pressure is quite low; nor can it explain why in India even farmers who own land are forced to leave their traditional way of life. The catalyst is the economic change from a subsistence economy to one based on cash.

The commodification of land

Indian farms are very small on average. Most village farmers acquire land through inheritance or marriage, or they farm other people’s land as renters or sharecroppers. Farms are often divided through inheritance. This process eventually splits the farmland into minuscule units. The farmers often work several tiny and widely separated plots of land, some that they own and some that they lease. Sometimes, siblings will maximize field size by sharing inherited land, or farmers will trade the use of plots in order to consolidate fields. Ties of family, caste, friendship and social indebtedness often play important roles; and lack of status can be even more disempowering than mere lack of cash, because access to land is not synonymous with ownership of land.

Traditionally, land in India was not bought and sold, it was acquired mainly through inheritance, marriage deals, gifting, and, in olden days, by conquest. The exception was when a family ran into an economic crisis and was forced to use their land as surety against a loan which it often could not repay.

Long-term, government-regulated credit is a new phenomenon in India. Mortgages have created a new market in land and, as land is increasingly traded, it becomes an investment opportunity over and above its value for agricultural production. As the value of land is increasingly controlled by distant markets, rents go up and they have to be paid in cash. Many landowners find it more profitable to sell their land rather than rent it out. Land available for rent decreases and a general inflation of land prices results. Poor farmers are forced into the cash economy where they must produce a cash crop to pay rent or buy land. However, while the price of the land, water, seed and other inputs has risen steadily, the price the village farmers receive for their crops remains stagnant.

The establishment of the Green Revolution

Traditionally, villages relied on local production from the land for their subsistence; but modern industrial agriculture relies on goods such as petroleum-based fertilizers and other agricultural chemicals that must be purchased with cash. This kind of market-driven agriculture has increased agricultural output, but this increase is not sustainable and, because the accounting is measured entirely in terms of money, the cost of the cultural and environmental injuries it leaves in its path are not included in the accounting.

Anisha: Organic Farming and Food Security

Industrialized agricultural innovations that began in the 1960s, known as The Green Revolution, demanded larger fields, more water, hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, and antibiotics as well as farm machinery. It was supposed to solve the problem of hunger by increasing agricultural yields. Many of these innovations did increase yields to a remarkable extent, but all of the inputs have to be purchased with cash, which increases the pressure to consolidate plots of land and do away with the old system of renting. When farmers can’t come up with the cash needed for land and materials, and they are driven out of business.

Traditional small-plot agriculture in India was based on many species and many varieties, each suited to a particular ecological niche. Soil was renewed with organic manures and soil structure was carefully nurtured to retain moisture and fertility. The new hybrid seeds require, not only chemical fertilizers and pesticides, but also much greater use of irrigation. These innovations led to an initial increase in production, but over the longer term such techniques can destroy the organic structure of the soil, leading to a decrease in the soil’s ability to retain moisture and support root systems which in turn leads to a decrease in the health of crops and to soil erosion. Large plantations of single crops increase susceptibility to pests, which then develop resistance to the pesticides; water, brought up from shallow wells, contains salts that accumulate in the soil, causing the desertification of large areas of once-arable land; and all of the inputs required by the new farming techniques have to be paid for with cash that the farmers don’t have.

Of course, village economies do use money but, in the past it circulated locally and prices were fixed by local factors. As more goods and services produced outside the village are introduced—medicine, petroleum products, fertilizer, pesticides, tractors, motorbikes, plastics, higher education, etc.—the need for cash to pay for these imports increases. The result is that the small farmers, and in some cases even small villages, are being driven out.

Susila Dharma in the cities and the villages

Gandhi claimed that, ‘The heart and soul of India is her villages.’ Yet, the traditional village was no paradise, especially for those at the bottom of the Indian caste system, the ‘Dalits’ who suffer badly in both the old system and the new. If there is hope, it lies in the people themselves creating a new life in the cities and re-imagining the village agricultural economy, creating institutions to support the dispossessed, and supplying the poor with the education and resources needed to retake control of their lives and re-establish their own prosperity and social structure.

Ramesh and his water buffalo.

My friend Ramesh still owns his family’s land, but he cannot farm it. He has no access to water. He was fortunate to have received some education and so was able to find work to replace the loss of his family’s livelihood. However, many of those who are forced to leave the villages in which they were raised do not have any schooling. These end up living in cities in makeshift shelters the fill empty lots and alleys or the rooftops of shops.

Transition is always difficult, especially when it occurs on a cultural level. Yet, even if one wanted to, it would be impossible to return to the subsistence-based village economies of the past. With India’s huge population, the old ways can no longer support the people. The new economics, based on trade with distant regions, does offer hope for India’s most disempowered citizens even as it creates havoc. At the moment the benefits of the global economy are distributed very unevenly, with the upper and middle classes acquiring material goods as fast as they can, while the livelihoods of the powerless are destroyed. Education, training, and access to tools and micro-capital may be the keys to opening the door to reasonable prosperity for these people.

Several of the Susila Dharma projects in southern India—the Mithra Foundation, the Centre for Culture and Development (CCD), and Anisha Urban—are dedicated to providing the new urban refugees with education and training, and, especially in the case of the Mithra Foundation and Anisha, an understanding of their basic human rights. With education and hope, the children of these slums may grow up to be  producers in the modern economy as well as consumers of food, health care, housing, transportation and other goods.

At the same time, SD India projects, such as Anisha Rural, CCD, SRADHA and Atam Deep Foundation, partner with villagers to develop new organic farming techniques and to help them think critically about an agriculture that is both economically and environmentally sustainable. Unlike Green Revolution technologies that replace human labour with hybrid seeds, chemical inputs and machines, the sustainable agricultural movement in India aims to educate farmers so that they are able to enter the new cash economy at an appropriate scale, without the dislocation that the Green Revolution technologies force on the rural population. In these systems grain, bean, and vegetable crops are complemented by cattle, goats, hens, ducks and fish, so that each process enriches the others while building natural resistance to diseases and infestations. Local knowledge, which can be reinforced by scientific research, enables the farmers to create a rich and healthy environment, while the human capital essential to sustainable agriculture is enriched instead of being displaced by economic and mechanical capital.