Rural Economy Workshop, 2025

The aim of the workshop was to gather together scholars who are working on or have worked on questions of Rural Economy or theorisations adjacent to it. The core starting point being described as below

Processes of dispossession and displacement from land, legitimised in the name of ‘development’, particularly in countries of the Global South as India, take place predominantly, although not exclusively, in a rural landscape that is marked by a severe agrarian crisis. In India, for instance, reduction of the total land under cultivation alongside decreasing average size of landholdings and increase in the proportion of small and marginal farmers presents an agrarian economy that is becoming increasingly unsustainable and insufficient to subsist households. A decreasingly remunerative agrarian sector comes in the wake of a sector that was never democratised or revolutionised in the first place, with the exception of pockets where the Green Revolution took off, and even in these regions capital-labour relations continued to be highly exploitative and built on pre-existing caste-based feudal relations. The combined impact of neoliberal policies and changing political economy of India on such a structure has been felt across different sections of the countryside. Removal of agricultural subsidies, shortage of labour arising from increased non-farm wage labour opportunities in rural areas, degrading ecological conditions and growing vulnerability in the wake of climate change, have together accounted for a crisis of social reproduction. This crisis is articulated through structures of caste, race, gender and ethnicity, where capitalism has worked through differences produced by such structures, thus shaping in important ways the nature of peasant politics, mobilisation and demands in the countryside. Increased commodity relations in the countryside, along with the crisis of social reproduction, has also meant greater blurring of lines between rural and urban working classes where circular migration has become the order of the day, lending credence to a broader category of “working people” from earlier conceptions of workers and peasants (Shivji 2017).

Through this process, peasants and farmers have continued to fight for what lands are under their control, leading to growing ‘land wars’ (Levien 2013). This further begs the question as to why land, within a failing sector of the economy, continues to be fought for dearly. Two important observations/issues in this context relate to the dynamic of capitalist growth and the role of agriculture within it. While agriculture and the rural economy, particularly in a context as India, are seen to be failing/in crisis, the resources it contains continue to serve as key in the growth and expansion of capitalism – evident from the onslaught on land and other natural resources and the growing instances of land grab across the world but more pronouncedly in the Global South. At the same time, scholars have pointed to the inadequacy of understanding these processes as a ‘transition question’ as Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation of capital frames the issue (D’Costa and Chakraborty 2017; Sanyal 2007). Instead, land dispossession is rooted in the dynamic of capital accumulation and expansion and not in the creation of capitalist social relations. Secondly, land and agrarian productive activities continue to remain an important resource for rural populations, and despite the crisis of social reproduction, continues to play a central role in it. Today, some of the most hard-fought battles are being fought over land and agriculture, and this only points to the urgent need to continue to pay attention to the dynamic set in place by the dialectics of capital accumulation and agrarian politics.

Drawing on Shattuck et al.’s (2023) reiteration of key concerns for the agrarian question, they remind us, “the classic agrarian question has always been about the possibilities of transcending exploitation in the countryside, about the possibilities for revolutionary change, about what comes beyond capitalism, how we might get there – and, (they add), the ways people are already creating non-capitalist forms of social life” (2023: 507). To this end, this workshop seeks to lay out the broad contours of some of these processes ongoing in the Global South and the strands that appear in contemporary agrarian politics. If the agrarian question is no longer a transition question, addressed in relation to serving the needs of industrialisation or urban economies – whether in the form of production and accumulation of surplus, or the production of food, or freeing up of labour – what are the nature of economic, political and social processes underway that draw attention to the dynamic of agrarian politics?

In a context as India, as Fraser (2014) prompts us, the agrarian question is just as much a social question as it is economic. For instance, how may an agrarian and/or rural economy be a remunerative one creating conditions of prosperity, but also one built on modern and progressive social relations, such that a village may no longer be a “sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism” (Ambedkar 1948). The agrarian question and the role of peasant politics and the state in taking up the challenges confronting rural societies and working classes must then confront questions of how food will be grown, how land will be held/possessed, what constitute the various elements of a flourishing rural and agrarian economy and society, and what ‘community’ looks like in such contexts. Are there ongoing processes, whether of social movements or working peoples’ organisations, that one can draw on to engage further with some of these questions?

With some of these concerns in mind, a closed door workshop was  organised by the New Political Economy Initiative, IIT Bombay in collabration with the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Guwahati and the Institute for Human Development, New Delhi. This workshop was followed by a field visit to the Bari Datara village (about 1.30 hours from Guwahati) to understand recent experiment with commercial agriculture.

Participants 

1. Amrita Datta, IIT Hyderabad
2. Alberto Alonso-Fradejas, Wageningen University
3. Andrew Flachs, Purdue University
4. Anindya Basak, IIT Guwahati
5. Anush Kapadia, New Political Economy Initiative, IIT Bombay
6. Archana Rangaswamaiah Azim Premji University
7. Bhim Reddy, Institute for Human Development (co-convenor)
8. Chunyu Wang, China Agricultural University
9. Debarshi Das, IIT Guwahati
10. Forrest Zhang, Singapore Management University
11. Glenn Davis Stone, Washington University
12. Jaideep Hardikar, New Political Economy Initiative, IIT Bombay
13. Jens Lerche, SOAS University of London
14. Kranthi Nanduri Jindal Global University
15. Kunal Munjal, IIt Hyderabad
16. Maryam Aslany, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford
17. Mrinalini Jha, O.P. Jindal Global University
18. Marta Inez Madeiros Marques, University of Sao Paulo
19. NG Sourav Singha, IIT Guwahati
20. Pranab Kumar Pegu, IIT Guwahati
21. Pranamika Hazarika, IIT Guwahati
22. Ranjana Padhi, Independent Researcher
23. Raj Patel, LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Austin
24. Ranjini Basu, National Law School of India University
25. Richa Kumar, IIT Delhi
26. Roshni Brahma, IIT Guwahati
27. Shreya Sinha, Queen Mary University of London
28. Sonal Raghuvanshi, New Political Economy Initiative, IIT Bombay
29. Surinder S Jodhka, Jawaharlal Nehru University
30. Vasundhara Jairath, IIT Guwahati (co-convenor)
31. Vikas Sharma, Jawaharlal Nehru University
32. Harshita Bhasin, South Asian University