14
relative disadvantage” (p.213). Undoubtedly, marginal farmers would face such
disadvantages more acutely than the small farmer category.
As shown in Table 2.6 and as alluded to earlier, the land-size holdings
of marginal farmers is so tiny that is almost impossible for them to become
viable. The profile of land appears as irrigated; that is because a greater degree
of fragmentation takes place on irrigated land as households, when they break-
up, are known to prefer vivisection of irrigated land more, and as Bharadwaj
noticed in her detailed study in 1974, that “fragmentation is present in all sizes
and possibly the adverse incidence on productivity due to fragmentation is
more on small farms which constitute smaller-sized fragments (p.A-15).
We will have an occasion to address the question of the credit needs
of different sections of the farm community in a subsequent section. For the
present, it would suffice to say that with the increases in capital intensity of
agriculture increasing and with the need for greater application of modern
purchased inputs, it is unlikely that tiny marginal holdings will be able to
sustain the levels of agricultural productivity that small, medium and large
farmers enjoy. It is for this reason that marginal farmers, even as compared
with small farmers, become easy candidates for migration to off-farm and
non-farm activities. As a public policy, the authorities will have to promote
such migration. One possibility is to permit marginal farmers to give out their
land on lease, for which legalisation of the lease market would be an essential
condition so that the ownership of land by marginal farmers in protected;
this can be done at individual states’ levels. The second essential requirement
would be the creation of opportunities for marginal farmers to participate
in non-farm activities. In this respect, the marginal farmers become obvious
candidates for getting included as part of the erstwhile SGSY programme which
has now been restructured as the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM)
and rechristened, borrowing from the Bihar experiment, as
Aajeevika.
As officially set out, “
Aajeevika
recognizes that the poor people have the
potential to come out of poverty with proper handholding, training and capacity
building and credit linkage.
Aajeevika
also believes that a strong institutional
architecture owned by the poor, enables them to access institutional credit
for various purposes, pursue livelihoods based on their resources, skills and
preferences and also to access other services and entitlements, both from the
public and private sector. Therefore,
Aajeevika
will focus on building strong
institutions of the poor into Self Help Groups (SHGs), their federations and
livelihoods collectives” (
Annual Report 2011-12,
Ministry of Rural Development,
p. 28, 29 and 31).
