Institute for Social and Economic Change |
Working Paper: 482
Agrarian Change in Bihar: A Study of Two Villages
Prashant Kumar Choudhary
Abstract
This paper deals with a profile of two villages studied at micro level comprising social, political, and agrarian characteristics. It also outlines the village level agrarian changes. The paper starts with the demography of the villages like education attainment, type of house, occupation and household income based on field study. It focuses on the district level agrarian change which took place in the last thirty years. This change is presented in terms of change in landholdings for the landowning class. The main aim of the paper is to describe the agrarian structure among different castes, agrarian change in relation to practice and conditions of sharecropping, availability of attached labour, tenancy and wage labour. It also describes the physical conditions of economic production which show that different factors such as mechanisation in agriculture, irrigation facility and availability of market for agricultural produce affect the existing agrarian system in the village economy.