The second session of the FAS Young Scholars’ Online Seminar Series 2022-23 featuring Srishti Yadav, Instructor, Department of Economics, University of Manitoba, was held on May 26, 2022. Over 70 researchers from across the world attended the seminar.

Srishti has recently finished her PhD from the New School for Social Research, New York. She spoke about her research on “Caste, Diversification, and the Contemporary Agrarian Question in India – A Field Perspective.”

Through her research, Srishti analysed agrarian class relations in Sangli, a village in Rewari district in southern Haryana, in light of the linkages of agricultural households with non-agricultural economic activities.

She finds that agricultural surplus enables diversification into business and formal employment and that these cash surpluses in agriculture depend on unpaid family labour. However, there is low evidence of re-investment of non-agricultural surplus back into cultivation.

Elaborating further on integrating caste-based framework into the class analysis, she argued that savarna landowners are petty commodity producers, primarily agricultural households with small diversifications are agents of capitalist development. In contrast, avarna labouring households lack social capital, fail safe of homestead agriculture and are confined to casual daily wage labour in the informal economy.

The session was Chaired by Barbara Harriss-White, Emeritus Professor of Development Studies, University of Oxford and Paramjit Singh, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Panjab University, acted as the discussant.

A Q&A session, moderated by the Chair, followed the presentation.

A recording of this session will soon be available on our YouTube Channel.

For more details, contact us at events[at]fas[dot]org[dot]in.