Revisiting Palakurichi with Professor Yoshifumi Usami
A four-member research team from the Foundation for Agrarian Studies re-visited the village of Palakurichi in Nagapattinam district of Tamil Nadu for two days on September 5 and 6, 2022. The team consisted of Arindam Das Joint Director of FAS, Tapas Singh Modak, Associate Fellow at the Foundation, and Sethu C. A., Research Assistant at FAS, and Dr Yoshifumi Usami, Retired Professor, Osaka Prefecture University, Japan, and a long time research collaborator of the Foundation. The visit was a part of Professor Usami’s visit to the Foundation between September 1 and 10, 2022.
In 2020, FAS initiated a study titled “Village-level Spatial Information using GIS technique: Palakurichi, Nagapattinam district, Tamil Nadu” in collaboration with the Department of Economics, Yokohama National University, Japan. It aimed to study the potential use of village maps digitised with the aid of GIS technology, in studying land use patterns, cropping patterns and other socio-economic characteristics in rural India. The project was extended to Phase-II, in collaboration with Prof. Daizo Sugimoto, Meijo University, Japan, in 2021. The specific objective of this phase was to study the land records systems in Palakurichi village.
The purpose of the current field visit was to get detailed information in this regard from Village Administrative Office (VAO) at Palakurichi and interview some key respondents in the village.
Palakurichi was first surveyed by the Foundation in May-June, 2019, as part of its project on “Agrarian Relations in the Lower Cauvery Delta.”
A gallery featuring pictures from Professor Usami’s visit can be found below