Indian Farmers are getting reduced to agricultural laborers or just laborers in urban centers

The official census data released by GOI recently gives the final numbers for India’s population, literacy rates and sex ratio, as also the number and types of workers which are split into four industrial categories: cultivators, agricultural labor, household industry workers and others. Cultivators remain the second-largest group at 119 million after ‘others’.

As per this latest release of official data, there are now about nine million fewer farmers than they used to be in 2001.    Part census 2011 data is as given below and it shows that while the proportion of cultivators to the total agricultural workforce has been falling steadily since 1961, this is the first time since 1971 that the number of cultivators has fallen in absolute terms as well.

Workers in Agriculture
			Figures in Millions
Year	Cultivators	Agricultural Laborers	Total Agriculture Workers
1951	69.9	27.3	97.2
1961	99.6	31.5	131.1
1971	78.2	47.5	125.7
1981	92.5	55.5	148
1991	110.7	74.6	185.3
2001	127.3	106.8	234.1
2011	118.7	144.3	263
Source: 2011 Census

Over the last 50 years, the proportion of farmers to the total population has been in steady decline, but the fall has not been big enough for the absolute number to go down, given population increases. But in the last decade, the fall in farming has combined with the slowing rate of population growth to create a fall in the absolute numbers of farmers.

As in previous decades, the proportion of agricultural laborers has increased; there are now 144 million agricultural laborers as against 107 millions in 2001. Since 1961, the proportion of agricultural laborers to total workforce in agriculture has increased from 24% to 55% in 2011.

Between cultivators and agricultural laborers, there are now 263 million people working in agriculture as against 234 million a decade ago.  The census also confirms trends thrown up by the National Sample Survey Organization, which is the rise of casual and irregular work. 

The rise in agricultural laborers could be explained by the falling size of land holdings over time due to division of land property by fathers to sons/wards.  Thus, in order to earn the living, the cultivators, if the land holding available to them is not economically viable, they sell or purchase the land from others depending on their financial position.  Many must be migrating from their villages if they do not get proper wages at their own places and would be becoming agricultural laborers in the high paying states/ districts within their state or just adopting shift in their work from agriculture to construction or industrial sector and their profile may be different as other workers/ laborers in nearby or distant metro cities.