Social Reproduction and the Agrarian Question of Women’s Labour in India
Sirisha C. Naidu1 and Lyn Ossome2
(In Press) Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 5(1): 1-27.
Abstract
Using a social reproduction framework, this article explores how reproduction of rural working
class households is rearticulated to capitalist production in India. Our analysis of the conditions in
India reveals that the interaction of three institutions – market, state, and household – has imposed
the burden of reproduction on women. In turn, women’s work is dependent on private and common
lands. This link, between the role of women’s unpaid labour in reproducing rural households and
the fact that this work remains largely dependent on land, constitutes a failure of the Indian
economy to provide decent livelihoods. It also reasserts gender equity as a contemporary and
unresolved question in the midst of India’s agrarian transition and underscores the importance of
instituting agrarian reforms and state intervention at levels sufficient for social reproduction.
Key words: Social reproduction; gender; land and labour; domestic economies; India
1
Corresponding Author: Department of Economics, Wright State University, Dayton, OH, USA.
sirisha.naidu@wright.edu
2
Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR), College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Makerere University,
Kampala, Uganda.
1
Introduction
Land reforms have been viewed as crucial to economic development by some and have long
constituted an integral aspect of radical political demands.3 According to this rationale, land
reforms would stimulate agricultural production, which, in turn, would facilitate accumulation
required for industrialization without undercutting investments in agriculture or the standard of
living of the working classes. However, the failure of land reforms in India, as well as a stagnating
agrarian economy, does not appear to have an impact on economic growth or capital accumulation
in the country, nor has the latter benefited all sections of society. To illustrate, in the period
between 1990–91 and 2004–05, the Annual Survey of Industries reports that the total value of
output in India increased by 518 percent and profits by 110 percent (Jha, 2009). Yet, in this same
period of phenomenal growth and profits, the total wage bill, including social security, only
increased by 240 percent (Jha, 2009), while in 1997–2008 the number of farmer suicides recorded
in India was 199,132 (Sainath, 2010). These developments pose questions regarding the continued
relevance of land for the rural economy.
While agriculture only contributes to 18 percent of value added in GDP, it continues to support
about 47 percent of total employment (WDI, 2014). It is of significant concern that the nonagricultural economy has created insufficient employment to absorb the relative surplus
population. The attrition of private and common lands by land grabs, competition from
international markets, and the globalized regime of flexible and precarious immobile labour but
mobile capital have, together, deepened the impact of the parallel process of withdrawal of the
Indian state from agricultural investment and protection of the working classes. The state has
intervened in some social welfare programmes, but these appear to be half-hearted attempts to
assuage the increasingly immiserated population and retain its legitimacy as a democratic entity
that exists in the interests of all classes.
Our objective in this paper is not to provide a discussion of economic growth, nor of the effect of
land on capital. Rather, we are interested in the conditions under which the rural poor reproduce
3
We thank participants of the 2016 AIAS/Agrarian South Summer School and two anonymous reviewers for their
thoughtful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.
2
themselves. Social reproduction would broadly include biological reproduction, everyday survival,
accumulation of education and skills to participate in the capitalist economy (for workers’
participation in the formal and informal labour market), acquisition of skills to ensure the survival
of the households (i.e., skills to engage in household production and care work) and inculcating
the necessary value system to ensure the reproduction of the patriarchal and capitalist economy.
We adopt a more basic definition of daily reproduction of working class households through the
acquisition and provision of such basic needs as food, shelter, clothing, and healthcare (Katz,
2001).
Social reproduction in contemporary capitalist economies hinges on the interplay between three
major institutions: households, markets, and the state (Antonopolous & Hirway, 2010; Dickinson
& Russell, 1985). The roles that these institutions play in ensuring social reproduction may both
contradict and complement each other. In addition, we also adopt Rosa Luxemburg’s (1951)
insights that non-capitalist forms of production are essential for capitalism even if the latter is
waged in a continuous struggle to undermine the former. Non-capitalist social formations of
household and family labour, specifically articulated to peasant modes of production, include
unpaid labour that directly benefits the market, as well as unpaid and invisible domestic productive
and reproductive labour. The latter supports the reproduction of the working classes and the reserve
army of labour, thus thus assuming the costs of supporting a labour pool. The incursion of capital
and consumer goods in rural areas and the dispossession that accompanies commodification forces
rural populations to purchase from the market what they used to produce for themselves. The
accompanying shrinking of the non-capitalist strata means that some rural households cannot keep
up with the socially determined level of consumption, thus lowering the living standards of all
workers. However, capitalism does not benefit from the complete destruction of non-capitalist
economies, as it would lead to a ‘standstill of accumulation’ (Luxemburg, 1951).
Economic changes since the 1980s have simultaneously differentiated and homogenized the
conditions of capitalist exploitation and, hence, the conditions under which rural households
reproduce. Rural households are engaged in various instances of work, including urban and rural,
agricultural and non-agricultural, wage employment and self-employment, and significantly for
this study, self-exploitative non-capitalist production. We do not relate these activities only with
3
petty-commodity production, but rather with the reliance of rural dwellers on different livelihood
strategies and wage work that does not free them from their peasant roots. We use an assemblage
of data from various sources to present our central argument, that due to the insufficiency of this
cornucopia of livelihood strategies, the satisfaction of the minimum consumption levels of rural
households and their very reproduction is critically dependent on women’s labour, which is, in
turn, articulated to the agrarian question of land. While state intervention in India provides some
succour, subsistence production, care work, and other forms of non-capitalist production support
the reproduction of the working classes, thereby subsidizing capitalist production. In turn, these
work activities, which are often, but not exclusively, carried out by women, are dependent on
private and common land. Land, therefore, does not assume significance only due to the semiproletarian condition, but also because the capitalist market economy does not support the
reproduction of the working classes (Moyo & Yeros, 2005). Under changed global economic
conditions, land ownership is unlikely to lift working classes out of poverty. Nevertheless,
reproduction of rural working class households depends on land and women’s labour, which, in
turn, portends continued immiseration and deepens the contradictions of achieving gender equity
under conditions of capitalism. Political demands for land and agrarian reform therefore should
address the gender inequities underlying women’s invisible work.
Our approach to this analysis is feminist political economy, through which we conceptualise the
various forms of women’s labour as being dialectically linked to changes in the agrarian structure
of society. Social change in rural India not only differs from the path predicted by the classical
agrarian question, but it has also been fraught with significant diversity across the country (Shah
& Harris-White, 2011). In their bid to theorize and understand the changes, researchers have relied
on a variety of methodological approaches. Some have relied on case studies involving
longitudinal researchor in new areas, whereas others focus on general formulations (ibid). This
study falls in the latter category, not as an attempt to homogenize, but to develop a structural
position on the basis of national-level data. We view the existence and continuation of women’s
reproductive unpaid labour as a continuation of capitalism’s tendency to produce and exploit noncapitalist forms of production. In this article, we show the agrarian question of labour as being not
only deeply gendered, but also highly differentiated by the social relations present in various
spheres of the production of labour under neoliberalism. This differentiation would explain, too,
4
the wide variations of labouring conditions by region in India – but such analysis is beyond the
scope of this paper.
Market economy, land and reproduction
The wage economy facilitates reproduction of workers and their families, as wages are transformed
into means of subsistence. Yet even though reproduction of labour power is a precondition for the
reproduction of capital, it is not integral to the sphere of surplus value production. The delinking
of the cycles of social reproduction and capital accumulation, especially under neoliberal
capitalism, leads to social fragmentation and births new (or deepens existing) contractions
(Mingione, 1985). In this section, we explore the conditions of reproduction in rural India that are
fostered by the capitalist market economy.
Structural transformation in the Indian economy, despite being stunted, has been accompanied by
increasing landlessness. The share of agriculture in value-added GDP dropped from 28 to 18.7
percent in 1994–2012, whereas the share of employment decreased from 61 to 47 percent in the
same period (WDI, 2014). Nearly 64 percent of all rural households own less than 0.41 hectares
(that is, less than one acre) of land, this being the group that Basole and Basu (2011) characterize
as ‘effectively landless’. Table 1 indicates that even though only 16 percent of rural households
owned less than 0.005 hectares in 2011–12, 48 percent of all rural households cultivated less than
0.005 hectares.
**INSERT TABLE 1 AROUND HERE**
Table 2 compares the proportion of income derived from various sources, total income, and
consumption expenditure for rural households in 2003 and 2012–13. It indicates that the
‘effectively landless’ households derived between 41 and less than one percent of their total
household income from agriculture in 2012-13. This suggests that agriculture alone may not be a
viable strategy for a large proportion of rural households and that dependence on agricultural
5
income varies even among the land-poor households. However, while agriculture is not the sole
source of income, neither is wage income. ‘Effectively landless’ households derived 38 to 64
percent of total household income from wages in 2012–13, thus hinting at a high degree of semiproletarianization. Table 2 suggests that ‘effectively landless’ households are engaged in diverse
livelihoods, including casual (agricultural and non-agricultural) labour and agricultural and nonagricultural self-employment (see also NSSO, 2014a). These data imply that although depeasantization is presently a key feature of the rural Indian economy, it is neither a stable nor linear
process, as peasant modes of production remain necessary for the survival of rural households.
**INSERT TABLE 2 AROUND HERE**
Furthermore, striking differences between income sources in 2003 and 2012–13 illustrate, in Table
2, the critical importance of land for sustaining households. Higher landholdings are positively
associated with the proportion of household income derived from agriculture and higher total
incomes, but negatively associated with the proportion of household income derived from wage
income. For households with landholdings above 0.41 hectares, agriculture contributed between
57 and 86 percent of total household income in 2012–13.
For land-rich households (with landholdings above 4.01 ha), the proportion of income received
from cultivation remains almost constant at 86 percent between 2003 and 2012-13. While total
household consumption expenditure for this section of rural society nearly doubled between 2003
and 2012–13 (from Rs. 6,418 to Rs. 14,447), net income increased nearly eightfold in the same
period, from Rs. 3,249 to Rs. 26,941. Similar to land-rich households, total household consumption
expenditure for households with the lowest landholdings (less than 0.001 ha) nearly doubled
between 2003 and 2012–13, from Rs. 2,997 to Rs. 5,108. However, unlike the land-rich, total
household income of land-poor households only tripled in the same period, from Rs. 1,380 to Rs.
4,561.
6
In 2003, households cultivating less than two hectares of land suffered an income deficit, which
could be explained by the agrarian crisis in the early part of the twenty-first century. However, ten
years later, in 2012–13, after the worst of the crisis, effectively landless households (with less than
0.41 ha) continued to face a deficit, ranging from 10 to 30 percent of total income. A simple ratio
of consumption expenditure in the highest and lowest land categories increased marginally in
2003–13, from 2.79 to 2.82. However, the ratio of income for the highest and lowest land
cultivating categories increased from 7.01 to 9.07, in the same period. Thus, relative inequalities
in consumption expenditures have not varied much over this 10-year period, possibly because
consumption patterns tend to be relatively smooth (Vakulabharanam, 2010), but relative inequality
in income has increased.
We make three related observations based on these data. First, while some may view the diversity
of livelihoods as an accumulative strategy, the income deficit faced by land-poor households
suggests the necessity of these livelihoods for the reproduction of rural working class households
(see also Shah & Harris-White, 2011). Second, land continues to be important in that it is
associated with higher net incomes. For those with lower landholdings, land may not constitute an
accumulative strategy or even a path out of poverty. Nevertheless, it potentially contributes to
reproduction (see also Moyo, Jha & Yeros, 2013). Third, it appears that income from market
engagement, which includes self-employment in agriculture and non-farm business and wage
labour, is insufficient for maintaining consumption and, hence, reproduction. As a result, we
hypothesize that land-poor households are able to sustain income deficits either due to state
intervention, non-capitalist production in the form of subsistence production, or remittances,
though we do not explore the issue of remittances in this paper.
State intervention in reproduction
As a precondition to capitalist production, reproduction of the working classes constitutes the ‘faux
frais’ of capitalist production (Marx, 1986: 603). Wages constitute the ‘first form of proletarian
subsistence’, but its adequacy in the processes of ‘self-managed reproduction’ depends on
workers’ access to employment and decent wages (Dickinson & Russell, 1985). To manage the
contradictions associated with a reproduction crisis, the state may intervene to prevent or mitigate
7
cost-shifting by capitalists through appropriate legislations, or may seek to underwrite some or
most of reproductive costs. The actual articulation and effective implementation of these
interventions, however, is historical and dependent on the social structure and the growth process
(ibid).
The Indian welfare regime4 since the 1980s has increasingly intervened only to the extent of
correcting market failures or failures of family provisioning, by providing meagre support to
‘deserving’ households (Palriwala & Neetha 2009). The intervention has been haphazard and
piecemeal (Gough, 2004), and has complemented the systematic gutting of the welfare regime
(Ahmed & Chatterjee 2013) to create a neoliberal state even more sensitive to the needs of the
capitalist economy. We focus our analysis in this section on two specific welfare programmes, the
National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and the Public Distribution System
(PDS), to illustrate the (inadequate) role of the Indian state in reproducing the household, and at
the same time, the tensions that exist in the provision and the coverage of these programmes.
The PDS system, which was initially restricted to urban households during World War II, was
extended to the entire country in post-colonial India as the joint responsibility of the federal and
state governments. The system provisions basic needs items at government-mandated fixed prices
through ‘fair price’ shops to ration cardholders. At the end of the last decade, there were about
478,000 such shops in the country (Palriwala & Neetha, 2009). By some reports, the PDS has the
highest recognition and participation of different government programmes (Dev, 2008, cited in
Palriwala & Neetha 2009). However, after liberalization, the emphasis shifted from universal
coverage to one of targeting households living below the poverty line for differential pricing.
Targeting has been necessitated by the declining share of food subsidy in government expenditure
and GDP. This has led to the exclusion of many households that should benefit from lower prices
and has fostered an environment of patronage and corruption (Palriwala & Neetha, 2009).
4
We follow Gough’s (2004) analytical distinction regarding state welfare provision between ‘welfare regimes’ and
‘welfare state’ regimes, to differentiate between the role and scale of state welfare provision in countries of the
Global North and South.
8
The Food Security Act (2013) further erodes this programme by allowing individual states the
discretionary provision to move from a targeted PDS to a cash transfer (CT) system. But CT is
unlikely to alleviate food insecurity and poverty, as the programme does not address the problem
of inflation indexing, the effects of volatile food prices, lack of access to cash due to poor banking
networks, and the collapse of minimum support prices to farmers, who might be compelled to
move away from food production or agriculture due to global competition (Ahmed & Chatterjee,
2013: 91). Further, in the absence of decent affordable public health and education systems, CTs
in India may not tackle the problem of a food budget squeeze that has potentially caused a decline
in calorie consumption in India (see Basole & Basu 2012; Ghosh, 2011; Patnaik, 2003), and will
significantly affect the effectively landless and unemployed households.
The other significant programme legislated in the last decade is the NREGS.5 An important aspect
of NREGS is that, unlike past public works programmes, it implicitly accepts that the problem of
under-consumption is endemic and is not restricted only to times of natural disasters (Palriwala &
Neetha, 2009). Also, unlike targeted PDS, it is open to all rural households. Beginning with the
poorest 200 districts, NREGS became a nationwide program in April 2008 (Jha & Gaiha, 2012),
and remains the largest social welfare programme in India, with a budget of about USD 7 billion
per year (Chopra, 2014).
With a significant proportion of households facing an income deficit (Table 2), income derived
from NREGS could form an important basis of survival for the land-poor. Case studies, however,
suggest varied impacts and implementation of NREGS across states. In states where it has been
implemented well, the impact has been significant. It has reportedly improved food security in
some parts of Central India and erstwhile Andhra Pradesh (Khera & Nayak, 2009; Ravi & Engler,
2013). Further, studies have reported that a high proportion of NREGS income is spent on food,
medical expenses, and education (Dreze & Khera, 2009; Pankaj, 2008; Joshi, Singh & Joshi, 2008;
Ravi & Engler, 2013). The greatest employment beneficiaries were those from lower castes,
landless households, casual agricultural workers, and households in the lowest consumption
5
The NREGS is a public works programme that guarantees 100 days of employment a year as a right to at least one
member of any rural household who is willing to perform unskilled labour at the statutory minimum wage for the
program. Provisions in the Act mandate that at least one-third of the workers should be women.
9
quintile; women benefited significantly from this scheme, although there is considerable inter-state
variation (Dutta et al., 2012; Dreze & Khera, 2009; Pankaj, 2008; Pankaj & Tankha, 2009). Thus,
NREGS work has been important in reproducing working class households, and has the potential
to benefit the significant proportion of land-poor working class households facing income deficits,
as indicated in Table 2.
Yet, despite its tremendous potential, the programme has been unable to fulfil unmet demand for
work. The average number of person-days worked among households in the poorest consumption
quintile participating in NREGS was 33.7 days in 2009–10, compared to the 100 days provision
(Dutta et al., 2012). The mean percentage of households that completed 100 days of work in 2009–
10 was a dismal three percent (Jha & Gaiha 2012). Furthermore, as with other welfare policies,
there have been numerous calls by the economic elite to reduce state support for NREGS. It is
telling that the combined expenditure on labour and employment by the federal and state
governments fell from 0.51 percent of total development and non-development expenditures in
1990–91 to less than 0.4 percent since 2000–01, even after the implementation of NREGS (RBI
2005, 2015).
The effect of India’s contradictory economic policies is visible in its undertaking to strengthen
welfare through NREGS and targeted PDS and CTs, despite an overarching neoliberal mode of
socio-economic regulation. The policies suggest that the state recognizes the need for cushioning
against the current accumulation regime. However, rather than inducing social transformation and
reducing inequality, the state has limited itself to meagre attempts to reduce poverty, and focused
on narrow objectives of economic growth and higher labour flexibilization (Palriwala & Neetha,
2009). State intervention within a capitalist logic or structure – even when seemingly pro-poor –
inevitably functions to maintain the dynamism of capitalist accumulation (Ahmed & Chatterjee,
2013, p. 87), especially when capital’s accumulation of political power is greater than that of the
labouring classes. The Indian state in this context has not adequately fulfilled its social
provisioning role. State intervention is deemed necessary only when families are incapable of
adequately fulfilling this role, and increasingly even this intervention is geared towards
‘individualization of social costs’ (Braedley, 2006, p. 216).
10
Households, women’s work and reproduction
The family-household constitutes another major institution of reproduction. It undertakes the
conversion of wages (and social grants) into necessities of life for individual consumption, and
engages in consumption of simple-use values (Dickinson & Russell, 1985). The persistence of
economic insecurity in the absence of adequate wages and state intervention also forces working
class households to engage in subsistence production or ‘domestic economies’ (Meillassoux, 1977,
cited in Cockcroft, 1983) to ensure survival. Labour expended in these activities constitute
reproductive work that is often, but not exclusively, the bastion of women’s invisible work. The
existence and persistence of ‘domestic economies’ particularly allows capitalists to expect the
reproduction of labour in the absence of a living wage and inadequate social welfare programmes.
Consequently, non-capitalist social formations of household and family labour shoulder a large
proportion of the burden of meeting minimum consumption levels essential for daily and
generational reproduction, and as Luxemburg (1951) suggests, continues to subsidize capital
accumulation.
Table 3 below provides data on the participation of female rural workers in India in various
activities, from 1983 to 2011–12. It indicates an increase in women’s participation in ‘all domestic’
activities, from 27.3 to 42.2 percent between 1987–88 and 2011–12. Correspondingly, the
women’s labour force participation rate (LFPR) has declined from 42.5 to 18 percent in the same
period. Some have attributed this trend to an ‘income effect’, in which higher household incomes
afford women the choice and luxury to withdraw from the labour market and produce goods that
would enhance the social ‘status’ of the household (Abraham, 2013). This argument is, however,
unconvincing.
First, the country is suffering from a lack of adequate employment creation for women workers.
A closer look at the components that make up the LFPR (Table 3) reveals that its decline stems
from a secular decrease in the proportion of women engaged in self-employed and unpaid work in
11
family enterprises, as well as casual wage work, from 1987–88 to 2011–12.6 To contextualize this
decline, it is important to note that in the period 2004–05 to 2011–12, when economic growth was
fairly high, approximately 30.3 million agricultural workers withdrew their labour in rural India,
of which 24.6 million (81.2 percent) were women (Thomas, 2014). In the same period, 25.7 million
jobs were created in the non-agricultural sector in rural India, but only 4.6 million of these (17.9
percent) were for women; the total female labour force consequently shrank by 20.5 million
(Thomas, 2014). Further, Kannan and Raveendran (2012) note that, of the total 28.16 million
women missing from the Indian labour force in 2010, 61 percent were from the poorest households,
thus challenging the ‘income effect’ explanation. Other studies instead attribute the decline in
women’s LFPR to agrarian change (Mukherjee, 2011), lack of sufficient well-paid jobs (Das,
2006), or the composition of growth rather than growth itself (Lahoti & Swaminathan, 2013).
**INSERT TABLE 3 AROUND HERE**
Second, conflating participation in domestic activities with status production obscures the realities
of rural working class and marginalized households in India. NSSO classifies ‘domestic activities’
into ‘domestic activities only’ and ‘domestic and allied activities’. The latter constitutes
unaccounted agricultural and allied activities, such as free collection of goods, preparation of cow
dung cakes, domestic production and processing, fetching water. ‘Domestic activities only’ is
assumed to consist of other invisible work that includes care work, cooking, and cleaning
(Mukherjee, 2011). Women’s participation in ‘domestic activities only’ increased from 15.1 to
18.5 percent between 1987–88 to 2011–12, but their participation in ‘domestic and allied activities’
increased from 12.2 to 23.7 percent in the same period (Table 3). While Figure 1 suggests a positive
association between women’s participation in ‘domestic activities only’ and household
consumption expenditure, participation in ‘domestic and allied activities’ is negatively correlated
6
It should be noted, however, that remuneration is less than desirable in these kinds of work and women tend to
extend themselves physically and mentally, especially when self-employed or working in family enterprises. In the
rural areas, both categories of work are primarily agricultural.
12
with household consumption. Thus, we argue that characterizing all domestic activities as social
‘status’ production is unwarranted.
**INSERT FIGURE 1 AROUND HERE**
Furthermore, Table 4 provides a breakdown of various activities undertaken by women
participating in domestic and allied activities. The highest participation is in unaccounted
agricultural production, free collection of goods, preparing cow dung, and fetching water, activities
which have suitable market substitutes although they may be unaffordable to the working classes.
According to the only National Time Use Survey conducted in 1998, ultra-poor women (who fall
below the midpoint of the poverty line) spent 23.6 percent of their time on low-productivity
subsistence work that is classified by NSSO as ‘domestic and allied activities’, whereas non-poor
women (above the poverty line, but below the midpoint of average consumption expenditure of
those above the poverty line) spent only 12.16 percent of their time on ‘domestic and allied
activities’ (Hirway, 2010). While there are no recent national time use studies to compare the
current situation, it is clear that domestic and allied activities are associated with low income and
social status. In addition, the increase in income inequality between land-rich and land-poor
households between 2003 and 2013 (Table 2), at the same time that which women’s participation
in domestic and allied activities increased from 18 to 23.7 percent, in 2004–05 to 2011–12 (Table
3), also suggests that working class households may be compensating for household income
deficit7 and income differences across class by increasing time spent in non-capitalist subsistence
production. The withdrawal of women from the labour force and their increased participation in
‘domestic and allied activities’ may be an indicator of a reproductive crisis, rather than signifying
social status or higher incomes.
Although subsistence production (domestic and allied activities) is not always carried out by
women, it is overwhelmingly dominated by women because of structural constraints. About 60
percent of women above the age of 15 years responding to the NSS 68th Round surveys noted that
7
See also Nathan and Kelkar (1999) for an analysis of the role of domestic economies after the Asian crisis.
13
their primary occupation was domestic work because no one else would do the work, whereas only
15.8 percent cited religious and social constraints (NSSO, 2014c). This indicates (though does not
confirm) the relevance of economic constraints and sexual division of labour in determining
women’s participation in domestic work instead of wage labour and other SNA (United Nations
System of National Accounts) activities.
Palriwala and Neetha (2009) attribute the crisis of consumption to inadequate labour
commodification and ‘familialism’, which relies on family and community networks and reiterates
the role of women’s work in reproducing the household. The declining female LFPR in India may
be a result of inadequate creation of high quality jobs, which has particularly impacted women
workers (Das, 2006; Patnaik, 2003). While it has long been accepted that women constitute a
significant proportion of the reserve army of labour (RAL), Table 4 provides evidence that this
labour constitutes the latent or floating components of the RAL, and not the stagnant component
engaged in status production and leisure activities, as suggested by some. It could be argued that
state provisioning and wages are low because of ‘familialism’. The direction of causality is,
however, unclear. It is also possible that domestic economies (non-capitalist production) provide
the only recourse to survival, given the lack of adequate jobs, wages, and social welfare measures.
Rather than indicating a ‘choice’, or being a remnant of traditional societies, ‘familialism’ may
reflect a constraint imposed by a neoliberal capitalism in which neither the market economy nor
the state are willing to commit to reproducing working class households (see also Braedley, 2006).
Increased participation in domestic and allied activities may thus reflect a coping mechanism to
deal with the crisis of reproduction, which also provides a gendered subsidy to capital.
**INSERT TABLE 4 AROUND HERE**
Land, women’s work and reproduction
Figure 2 indicates that 15 to 20 percent of women from households across different levels of land
cultivation participated in ‘domestic and allied activities’ in 2011–12. The non-linear relationship
14
between the two variables suggests that women from ‘effectively landless’ households have a
higher participation in ‘domestic and allied’ activities (see also Sen & Sen, 1985). Land and
‘domestic activities only’ also display a non-linear relationship, in that participation in the latter is
negatively associated with land as long as land cultivated is one hectare or less.
As Table 4 indicates, 59.8percent of women engaged in domestic and allied activities engaged in
free collection of firewood and cattle fodder and 22.4 percent participated in free collection of fish
and other food items, both of which require access to private or common lands. The blurring of
perceived dichotomies between agrarian and environmental change has led to research that argues
in favour of historical complementarity between agrarian livelihoods and private and common
lands (Agrawal & Sivaramakrishnan, 2000; MRD, 2009). Past literature suggests a non-linear
relationship between land and free collection of goods (Narain et al., 2008). However, the rural
land-poor are more dependent than the land-rich on free collection of goods from private and
commons lands (Adhikari, 2005; Narain et al., 2008). Some studies have estimated that
consumption of goods from common lands account for between nine to 26 percent of total rural
household income,8 91 to 100 percent of total fuel requirements, and 69 to 89 percent of livestock
feed requirements (Beck & Ghosh, 2000; Jodha, 1986). We do not propose to extrapolate these
results to all aspects of domestic and allied activities, but this literature compels us to recognize
the relationship between land and women’s work.
**INSERT FIGURE 2 AROUND HERE**
Land and its contemporary relevance
Land reform has long been considered significant to rural development and poverty alleviation,
but appears less relevant in the changed circumstances of the Indian and global economies. Yet,
8
These figures are most likely lower bound estimates due to the limitations of assigning market-based exchange
value to the use value of goods and services that do not pass through the market.
15
its significance in relation to the crisis of reproduction – the expression of which is highly gendered
by the fact that the bulk of the burden of reproduction is being shouldered by household labour
performed mainly by women – cannot be gainsaid. The economic and social character of the
subsidy afforded to capitalist accumulation by domestic economies asserts gender (the gendered
characteristic of household reproduction) as a core and as yet unresolved variable of the
contemporary agrarian question (Moyo, Jha & Yeros, 2013). While domestic economies may have
historically provided a wage subsidy, the attrition of such economies to land grabs, competition
from international markets, and enclosure of forests and other natural resources makes such a
subsidy less likely with the level of effort required prior to liberalization. It is in this context that
we can understand the need for higher participation in domestic and allied activities. In the period
1987–88 to 2011–12, participation in domestic and allied activities jumped more than 10
percentage points. For women in ‘effectively landless’ households (less than 0.41 hectares), the
category of domestic and allied work, which is labour intensive and invisible, keeps the highest
proportion of women occupied. This suggests a positive complementarity between women’s work,
land (both common and private) and reproduction.
In 2004, 57 years after Independence, the Common Minimum Programme of the then ruling party
re-stated its feeble commitment to land reforms by declaring that ‘landless families will be
endowed with land through implementation of land ceiling and redistribution legislation. No
reversal of ceiling will be permitted’ (cited in MRD, 2009). Unsurprisingly, however, nothing was
actually done to fulfil land reforms. Instead, the Indian state has been either a silent spectator or
an active facilitator in the dispossession of private and common lands from the marginalized.
Combined with an inadequate wage economy, the dispossession from private and common lands
has imposed an inordinately high burden of reproduction on households, especially women in these
households.
Land also assumes significance in capitalist economic growth and this is evident in the massive
transfers of land for mining, industrial, residential and commercial real estate and infrastructural
projects. However, the resulting economic growth has not created an adequate number of jobs and
well-paying jobs that would improve standards of living to justify the loss of traditional
livelihoods. This has particularly affected women’s labour force participation (Das, 2006; Ghosh,
16
2011). De-peasantization thus does not guarantee proletarianization due to insufficient creation of
secure well-paid jobs. Furthermore, the participation of the most vulnerable sections of rural India
in the labour market may be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the reproduction of the
rural labouring household, owing to labour flexibilization and deteriorating work conditions.
Lacking their own means of production and combined with the poor state provisioning, rural Indian
households are locked into an impoverishing cycle of poor quality jobs and low wages. The effects
of this can only be borne by resorting to domestic economies, which is attracting high participation
in the period after liberalization. Domestic economies, in turn, continue to be dependent on land.
Of the domestic and allied activities for which NSSO collects data, the highest participation of
women is in activities that directly or indirectly depend on either private or common lands.
The Ministry of Rural Development asserts that ‘land reforms, including redistributive measures
and security of tenure and ownership, prevention of usurious alienation from vulnerable segments
of people and ownership of house sites’ is essential to rid the country of rural poverty (MRD, 2009,
p. [6]). It is, therefore, not surprising that despite the agricultural sector’s declining share of GDP
and employment, popular land struggles continue to dominate the Indian political landscape. In
2015, hundreds of farmers protested en masse, with tragic consequences, against the Indian state’s
proposed amendments to the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act of 2013.
While the working-class and the lower middle class bear the burden of supporting the stagnant
form of RAL (Marx, 1986: 603), it is the yet non-commodified sphere of household subsistence
production that shoulders the weight of reproducing the labour pool and the floating and latent
forms of the RAL.
Feminist researchers have advocated for gender sensitive land reforms so that women’s right to
own and control land would combat patriarchy, feminization of poverty, and improve the
bargaining and social position of women within and outside the household (Agarwal, 1997, 1994;
Kelkar, 2013). It is only recently that there has been some improvement in furthering the rights of
women to land in India. The 2005 amendment to the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 enlarges the
rights (and liabilities) of married and unmarried daughters in the Hindu family, consonant with
those of the male progeny of a coparcener. Notwithstanding contestations by male family members
unwilling to part with their claims to the family inheritance, and women themselves willingly
17
giving up their claims to avoid conflict and maintain cordial relations with their natal family, this
legal amendment is fraught with larger problems, two of which are relevant to our discussion.
First, a large proportion of rural households in India are effectively landless (Basole & Basu, 2011),
and, hence, this legislation does not address their plight. This problem could be mitigated if women
form agricultural cooperatives and purchase land and materials as a collective (Agarwal, 2010).
However, this still raises the question of how initial capital would be raised, and does not offer a
way out of neoliberal market-led agrarian reforms.
Second, the immiserating conditions suffered by the working classes, and particularly women from
these classes, are not driven solely by a contextual patriarchy. Suggesting land reforms and
women’s right to land as a panacea to poverty reduction and empowerment ignores the realities of
social relations of rural production and its articulation with the capitalist sector. Studies of the
agrarian economy in India have suggested that class and ethnicity often supersede gender
identities, that is, often women from upper class and castes are complicit in the economic
exploitation of lower class, landless women (N. Rao, 2005; S. Rao, 2011). Thus, the amendment
to the Hindu Succession Act does not serve to destabilize the agrarian class structure. The high
incidence of subsistence production among land-poor households confronts us with the question
of whether imperial capitalism is destroying traditional peasantries (Bernstein, 2004), or whether
what we are witnessing is ‘not the disappearance of the peasantry, but rather, its redefinition’
(Johnson, 2004, p. 54). Given capitalism’s tendencies towards ‘involution’ via its spatial
concentration and centralization, matched by an expanding sphere of social exclusion, Johnson
(2004, p. 63) adds:
The peasant form of production as operating according to a driving logic of subsistence
and retaining at least some form of control over the means of production is not
disappearing. Rather, it persists as rural populations are increasingly marginalized and
impoverished by the currents of global capital. The persistence of the peasantry is not a
positive process. It stands as a testament of the failures of the development project.
18
Extending this argument to women’s work, women’s dependence on land for low-productivity and
labour-intensive subsistence production to sustain domestic economies, while important to
reproduction, is also cause for concern. It indicates the failure of the Indian economy to provide
decent livelihoods. Women’s increased participation in domestic economies is a result of
contextually and historically determined patriarchy that works in tandem with neoliberal
capitalism. Hence, land reforms that rely on individualist ontologies and which are concerned only
with tenure security or land distribution may be insufficient for social transformation (Razavi,
2003).
Furthermore, as we have argued in this paper, gender inequity – which we address through an
interrogation of reproductive labour – remains a contradiction to the peasant path to agrarian
transformation. In other words, the prism of subsistence economies and the gendered labour
regimes therein, which are highly predicated upon the free, exploitative, and self-exploitative
labour performed by rural women on a daily basis, present the peasantry as a contradictory social
force in the course of India’s agrarian transformation. For even when gender is accounted for
(normatively through guarantees of women’s rights to land), this incorporation cannot proceed in
isolation from the conditions of the global economy. That is, women might have land which they
do not actually cultivate due to, for instance, insufficient support for agriculture and the failures or
insufficiency of state provisioning. It may not be possible for women to escape the trap of poverty
and immiseration simply because they have access to land. The failure to address the question of
reproductive labour (the agrarian question of gendered labour) thus renders land reforms as
incomplete. Ultimately, there is need to address the question of social reproduction.
In this regard, we view the failure of land and agrarian reforms in India as critical to understanding
not only capitalism’s exploitative tendencies in relation to women’s reproductive labour, as argued
in this paper, but also ironically, as a commentary on the continued relevance of land in the process
of household reproduction.
19
Conclusion
We have argued that the changing global conditions make it unlikely for land to lift the working
classes out of poverty. Yet, land still affords the primary means of reproduction of rural
households, a function which is still largely dependent on women’s labour. This link – between
the role of women’s unpaid labour in reproducing rural households and the fact that this work
remains largely dependent on land – reasserts gender equity as a contemporary and unresolved
question in the midst of India’s agrarian transition. The complexities and contradictions staged by
neoliberal reforms means that neoliberal capitalist expansion ignores and undermines the
reproductive aspects of land and women’s labour, even as capitalist accumulation depends on
them. The fact that reproduction relies on women’s work further implies that household
consumption is a function of a gender subsidy to capital. This subsidy traps women in their role in
the reproductive household economy.
Ultimately our analysis makes visible two sets of issues that ought to be the focus of political
demands: first, that land reform should address the gender inequities underlying women’s invisible
work, which entails making demands for structural changes that recognize the household sphere
of reproduction through which gender becomes articulated to capitalist production; and second,
that state intervention in both wages and households should be instituted at levels sufficient for
reproduction, which otherwise continues to constitute a significant sphere of exploitation of
women under capitalism.
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Tables
Table 1: Distribution of rural households by land-size categories, 2011–12
Land in
hectares
<0.004
0.005-0.4
0.41-1.00
1.01-2
2.01-4.00
> 4.01
Distribution of households (%)
by land
cultivated
48
by land
owned
15.5
Source: NSSO (2014a).
19.8
14.2
10.3
5.4
2.4
48
16.7
10.9
6.3
2.7
Table 2: Proportion of income from various sources, consumption expenditure and net investment per
household and household deficit (2003 and 2012–13)
Size class
of land
possessed
in hectares
<0.001
0.0010.004
0.005-0.4
0.41-1
1.01-2
2.01-4
>=4.01
All
Proportion of income from
Net
receipt
from
Animal
Wages cultivation farming
2012-13
63.63
0.66
25.89
57.47
38.33
23.52
15.44
10.34
3.17
32.23
2003
77.90
16.55
40.88
57.28
68.58
77.62
86.22
47.95
14.96
11.99
11.13
10.82
7.64
6.34
11.87
Nonfarm
business
Total
income
(Rs.)
Net income =
total income
Total
consumption less
expenditure expenditure
(Rs.)
(Rs.)
9.80
4561
5108
-547
11.05
8.81
8.07
5.16
4.38
4.28
7.97
4152
5247
7348
10730
19637
41388
6426
5401
6020
6457
7786
10104
14447
6223
-1249
-773
891
2944
9533
26941
203
1380
2297
-917
1633
1809
2493
3589
5681
9667
2115
2390
2672
3148
3685
4626
6418
2770
-757
-863
-655
-96
1055
3249
-655
<0.001
0.80
4.64
16.67
0.0010.004
59.58
18.13
5.76
16.53
0.005-0.4
39.80
43.34
6.19
10.67
0.41-1
25.47
63.30
4.09
7.14
1.01-2
17.75
74.81
1.59
5.85
2.01-4
8.55
82.31
0.21
8.92
>=4.01
5.76
86.08
1.17
6.99
All
38.72
45.82
4.30
11.16
Source: NSSO (2005, 2014b); authors’ calculations.
26
Table 3: Female usual activity status distribution (for all ages), 1983–2012
Activity status (PS)
Self-employed & unpaid
family worker(1)
Regular wage work (2)
Casual wage work (3)
All Domestic (4)
domestic duties only (4a)
Domestic duties & allied
activities (4b)
Unemployed (5)
Education (6)
Others (7)
WPR (1+2+3)
LFPR (1+2+3+5)
1983
1987-88
1993-94
Rural
1999-2000
2004-05
2009-10
2011-12
21
1.6
18
29.8
15.9
22
2.1
17
27.3
15.1
18.5
1.3
17
34.4
15.7
11.4
0.9
11
36.3
20.3
13.6
1.2
9
35.5
17.5
10.2
1.1
9
39.9
22
9.4
1.3
6.8
42.2
18.5
13.9
0.6
7.6
21.4
40.6
41.2
12.2
1.4
7.2
23.1
41.1
42.5
18.7
0.5
11.7
16.2
36.8
37.3
16
0
18.4
22.4
23.3
23.3
18
0.8
21.3
18.4
23.8
24.6
17.9
0.5
23.8
15.6
20.3
20.8
23.7
0.5
25.1
14.7
17.5
18
Source: Abraham (2013).
Table 4: Participation of women (15–59 years) usually engaged in domestic and allied activities
(including subsidiary status) in 2011–12
Specified activities
Maintenance of kitchen garden (1)
Work in household poultry etc. (2)
Unaccounted agricultural & allied activities (1or2)
Free collection of fish etc. (3)
Free collection of firewood, cattle fodder etc. (4)
Free collection of goods (3or4)
Food processing (own produce) (5)
Food processing (acquired) (6)
Preparing cow-dung cakes (7)
Sewing tailoring etc. (8)
Free tutoring of own and other's children (9)
Fetching water from outside house (10)
Fetching water from outside village (11)
Women in this age and status category engaged in at
least one of the above activities
Rural (%)
24.1
38
47.3
22.4
57.8
59.8
11.1
6
56.3
29.3
5.4
40.4
1
89.5
Source: NSSO (2014c).
27
Figures
Figure 1: Distribution of rural women’s participation in domestic duties by MPCE deciles, 2011–12
Domestic only
30
Domestic & allied
25
Percent
20
15
10
5
0
0-10
10-20
20-30
30-40
40-50
50-60
60-70
70-80
80-90
90-100
MPCE Deciles
Source: (NSSO 2014a).
Note 1: MPCE = monthly per capital consumption expenditure of households.
Note 2: Data on activity status includes principal and subsidiary status.
28
Figure 2: Distribution of rural women’s participation in domestic duties by land cultivated, 2011–12
25
Domestic only
Domestic & allied
20
Percent
15
10
5
0
<0.005
0.005-0.4
0.41-1.00
1.01-2
2.01-4.00
> 4.01
Land (ha)
Source: NSSO (2014a).
Note: Data on activity status includes principal and subsidiary status.
29