This book, edited by Madhura Swaminathan and Vikas Rawal, studies the distribution, across socio-economic classes and across castes, of a range of variables — including incomes from crop production and other sources, ownership and control of land and other assets, aspects of employment, and access to credit — from two villages in Rajasthan. We argue that location in the class and social hierarchy, particularly for those at the two ends of the hierarchy, is critical for understanding economic and non-economic aspects of living standards.

The first village is 25 F Gulabewala village in Sri Ganganagar district, surveyed in 2007. The data and analysis presented in this book show the development of capitalist agriculture in Gulabewala village. Crop production in Gulabewala is characterised by high yields and income, high levels of mechanisation, and low levels of use of family labour. Differentiation has led to the emergence of two major classes in the village: big capitalist farmers and rural manual workers. This differentiation is associated with a high degree of landlessness, high inequality in the ownership of land and other assets, and, consequently, very high inequality in incomes.

A distinctive feature of the village is the near-perfect correlation between class and caste. Dalit households – from both Sikh and Hindu backgrounds – comprised the landless, assetless rural proletariat. The Jat Sikh households (classified as Other Backward Classes or OBC in Rajasthan) were the landowning capitalist farmers. Gulabewala village is an example of the paradox of the Indian countryside, that is, the development of productive forces and capitalist agriculture alongside the persistence of unfree labour relations and discriminatory social relations.

The second village, Rewasi in Sikar block and district, belongs to the semi-arid region of Rajasthan. The village was surveyed in 2010. In Rewasi village, the ownership of tubewells and other sources of irrigation was critical for agricultural production. The reference year of our survey, 2009-10, was a year of low rainfall and widespread crop failure in the kharif season. As a result, agricultural incomes in the reference year were very low. However, as our data on costs and incomes from cultivation show, the economic impact of drought was differential across classes. With better access to irrigation and capital, landlords and richer sections of the peasantry were better able to withstand drought-like conditions and contain their losses. On the other hand, poor peasants and cultivating households from the class of hired manual workers incurred substantial losses as a result of drought.

In the survey year, incomes from agriculture were meagre and constituted a relatively small share of total household income for most households. While the village rich derived substantial incomes from businesses and salaried jobs, poor peasants and manual workers depended substantively on wage labour. Availability of wage employment within the village was limited, and many workers from Rewasi migrated to different parts of India as well as to other countries, in particular to West Asia. A majority of migrants from Rewasi worked in skilled occupations. More than one-half of households surveyed in the village received remittances in the reference year, averaging Rs 31,000 per household. Another important source of income was from animal husbandry. The majority of households owned animals; for example, 94 percent of households owned goats. Animal resources were thus an important means to sustain incomes and nutrition in bad agricultural years.