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Exploring research ideas and building collaborations has been our way forward these past three months.
In July, we jointly organised the virtual workshop on Agrarian
Relations, with Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and Research Initiatives
Bangladesh, a first of a kind experience for us. The event, originally
envisioned as an in-person workshop in Dhaka two years ago, was
postponed multiple times owing to Covid-19. We see the realisation of
this long pending idea as a sign of things getting back to normal. In
the future, we look forward to holding such workshops in partnership
with research organisations working in different parts of South Asia.
We continued to successfully hold our monthly Young Scholars' Seminar
Series. The encouraging response to the series has prompted us to think
seriously about hosting more such series in the future.
Part of the motivation to hold the seminar series has been to expand our
research network that will lead to future collaborations. We have made
good progress on that front with some of our researchers beginning to
work with a few of the presenters on various research ideas.
We have also tried new ways of communicating our research to the larger
public in the past quarter. A short six-part explainer series on
Agricultural Tenancy in India marked the beginning of such an effort. We
will be bringing out more such posts in the coming months.
Sandipan Baksi
Director,
Foundation for Agrarian Studies
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RESEARCH
Trends in Gender Division of Work and Wages in Rural India
This ongoing research project
titled “Big Data Analysis to Understand Trends in Gender Division of
Work and Wages in Rural India and Trends in Costs and Incomes from Crop
Production in India,” is being undertaken by the Foundation in
association with the Evidence Module of the CGIAR GENDER Platform led by the International Rice Research Institute.
The mandate of this project is to study
gender division of work and the difference between wages of male and
female workers in the Indian countryside. It will use detailed
gender-disaggregated data on labour absorption, forms of labour, and
agricultural operations for a diversity of crops from eight villages
spread across five States in distinct agro-ecological regions of India
to examine the effect of various factors like agro-ecology, cropping
pattern, level of mechanisation and gender division of labour, on gender
wage gap.
A subsidiary part of this project will also examine the State-wise
trends in costs of cultivation, prices, and incomes from 2000-01 to
2019-20 for selected agricultural commodities in India.
The Oral History Project on the Formation of a Community of Agricultural Scientists in India
While archives and collections of oral history interviews of agriculture
scientists and policy makers have been developed in some parts of the
world, no such attempt has been made in India, despite the remarkable
contribution of the Indian agricultural science community to global food
security and to the development of agricultural science.
This project is a pioneering effort in that direction. It seeks to
critically enquire into the lives and contributions of the first few
generations of agricultural scientists of independent India, who played a
role in the making of the Green Revolution in the country. It will lay
the foundations of a unique archive of oral history interviews of
scientists in India.
So far, we have interviewed a few eminent agricultural scientists and are in the process of identifying other names.
The Foundation is also in touch with the archives at the National Centre
for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, to explore the possibility of
hosting these oral history accounts.
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PUBLICATIONS
FAS Blogs
Deregulation of Agricultural Marketing: How has it Affected the APMC System in Karnataka?
by Ayush Kumar
In December 2020, in line with the Central Farm Laws, the Government of
Karnataka passed an amendment to the Karnataka Agricultural Produce
Marketing (Regulation and Development) Act, 1966.
In this blog, Ayush Kumar tries to understand the effect this has had on
arrivals and prices of onion in the Yeshwanthpura APMC market in
Bengaluru.
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EVENTS
Public Events
Workshop on Agrarian Relations
On July 30 and 31, the Foundation for
Agrarian Studies (FAS), along with Research Initiatives Bangladesh (RIB)
and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS) conducted a two-day virtual workshop
on Agrarian Relations.
In the two-day workshop, researchers and collaborators from FAS and RIB
discussed the Foundation's methodology of village studies and results
obtained from the analysis of data collected through these studies.
FAS Young Scholars' Online Seminar Series 2022-23
Starting April 2022, the Foundation has been
organising the Young Scholars’ Online Seminar Series. The series aims
to provide a platform to a selected group of young scholars from India
and across the world working on agrarian studies and socioeconomic life
of rural India to present their work. We held seminars 4,5, and 6 in the
past three months.
Seminar 4
Impact of Information on the Technical Efficiency of Agricultural Production in India by Aritri Chakravarty
Aritri’s seminar, held in July, began with the argument that information
helps in reducing the risks and uncertainties associated with
agriculture and that it is also important for farmers to transition to
modern inputs.
She showed that users of information have a slightly higher efficiency
than non-users but the impacts vary largely across different sources of
information. Her findings hinted at a source effect working at large
that tends to dampen the true effect of information.
Dr Manjula M from Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, acted as the discussant for this session.
Seminar 5
Patterns of Accumulation and Differentiation in the Non-Agrarian Informal Sector in India by Kranthi Nanduri
The fifth session of the seminar featuring
Kranthi Nanduri, Assistant Professor, Jindal School of Banking and
Finance, Sonipat, was held in August.
In her presentation, Kranthi showed that the accumulation and
differentiation patterns in India's non-agrarian informal sector
comprising manufacturing, trade, and services activities are diverse.
She argued that these variations within the informal sector are linked
to variations in the nature of market growth, which are in turn linked
to the nature of agriculture labour productivity.
Bheemeshwar Reddy, Assistant Professor, Birla Institute of Technology
and Sciences, Pilani, Hyderabad Campus, was the discussant for this
session.
Seminar 6
Rural Employment Diversification in India: Evidence from a Village Resurvey in southern Karnataka by B Satheesha
As part of the sixth seminar of the series, B Satheesha presented his
work that examines the factors that influence rural employment
diversification in India.
For this, he analysed the data obtained from the resurvey of
Alabujanahalli, a village in southern Karnataka that was first surveyed
by the Foundation in 2009. He found that favourable historical
conditions contributed to agricultural prosperity and continued
dependency on agriculture for livelihood in the village for several
decades.
However, the resurvey of Alabujanahalli in
2018-19 showed some diversification of employment after 2009, towards
the non-farm sector. He pointed out that the expansion of education and
deepening agrarian crisis may have contributed to the non- farm
diversification of Alabujanahalli in the recent period.
Rajshree Bedamatta, Professor, Department of Humanities and Social
Sciences, IIT Guwahati, acted as the discussant for this session.
In-house Seminars
In-House Training Sessions
In the past three months, we have conducted
multiple training sessions for our staff on the usage of various
productivity tools during this quarter. These sessions included
workshops on data visualisation, Google Workspace, and computer
networks.
In-House Seminar on Women and Migration
In September, Rakesh Mahato, Senior Data
Analyst at the Foundation, discussed the dynamics of gender and
migration as part of our regular in-house seminar series. For this, he
analysed data from two villages in North Bihar, Katkuian and Nayanagar,
that were collected as part of the Foundation’s Project on Agrarian
Relations in India (PARI).
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INITIATIVES
Agricultural Tenancy Series on Social Media
In the months of June, July and August we
ran a short social media campaign that touched upon various features of
agricultural tenancy in India like its persistence, informal nature and
heterogeneity of tenant farmers among others.
A Twitter thread that collates all the six posts can be found here.
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MEDIA COVERAGE
Over the past three months, noted media organisations like Fact Checker and News Click have featured reports and articles based on the Foundation's research.
Fact Checker's report that
discusses that Foundation's report on public spending on agriculture,
while examining the claims of increase in Union Agriculture Budget.
Sandipan Baksi's piece in NewsClick on the ground reality in rural Bihar in light of the political developments in the State.
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