Peasantry and Surplus

A semi-feudal agrarian economy at a mofussil level invariably faces recurring problems of insufficient production on farms and food deficits in households. Such problems have but rather deepened further since 1991 – the year of neoliberal economic reforms in India. Contemporary literature is but geared to abstracting from the facts that the economic differentiation among producers over time lead to divergences in production performances, ensuing as it is from the resource inequity and asymmetry in asset distribution and manifested in observed relations of labour exploitation, and is rather inherited from the pre-reforms period only. This monograph analyzes cross-section data from Purnia – a north Bihar district of India – to establish the inherited nature of the divergences in the costs, production, surplus and poverty across different classes of peasantry. It is hoped that the analysis put forward on the pattern of generation of disposable surplus and its relation with poverty in the benchmark year of reforms would be of interest and useful to the post graduate students, researchers, academics and policy makers in south Asia.