This is an ongoing project.

The objective of this project is to study the extent and nature of proletarianisation across different agro-ecological regions in the contemporary Indian countryside. It aims to do so by studying three aspects of proletarianisation.

Proletarianisation can be characterised by the absolute loss of land by cultivating peasants. A rough measure of proletarianisation in this regard, is the proportion of landless households in a village. PARI data show that a very substantial proportion of households in the study villages have no ownership holdings of land, and that all villages are characterised by high levels of inequality in the distribution of ownership holdings of land.

Another measure of proletarianisation is the extent to which sections of the peasantry are drawn into the market for hired labour while preserving their peasant status. This phenomenon has not been analysed statistically in India because of the absence of quantitative data on forms of labour in agriculture. PARI data are unique as they provide information with respect to forms of labour in agriculture, data that can be disaggregated by crop, crop operation, and gender.

A third aspect of proletarianisation is the extent to which all sections of the working poor, including poor and middle peasants, employ wage labour in agriculture, and the extent to which peasants have to work as hired workers on and off the farm in order to achieve subsistence levels of income.

An initial paper on this phenomenon by V. K. Ramachandran, Aditi Dixit, and T. Sivamurugan analysed data from 10 villages located in five different States of India for the analysis.