There are a thousand ways rural India is changing?socially, politically and economically. Livelihoods have diversified decisively away from agriculture to better-paid occupations across industry and services. And how rural Indian now works is redefining age-old caste and social equations like never before.
Rapid, over 8% plus, economic growth over the past decade or so has had its welcome trickle-down effect in rural areas, with a healthy growth in income. Better connectivity?both roads and telecom?with cities and electrification have boosted productivity and brought hitherto urban-only products and services to rural doorsteps, fuelling a consumption boom that famously saved many a big-ticket marketer from the global economic crisis-led demand slowdown in cities in 2008-09.
Inclusive government policies like the rural job scheme, loan waivers and better prices for crops acted as stress mitigators wherever markets failed to deliver or were absent. Microfinance and organised retail, currently limited in reach, have demonstrated the multiplier effect of reaching directly to rural consumers and producers in lifting rural incomes and productivity. Politics of social empowerment and entitlement, from women?s reservation in Panchayati Raj to Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, howsoever flawed in design or motivated by vote banks, has changed rural India’s subaltern landscape for the better.
Much as all this is heartening to recall, large swaths of rural India remain plagued by disease, illiteracy, abject poverty, malnutrition, unemployment and all manner of social and political ills. The vagaries of monsoons still decide survival for millions. Formal enterprise of any kind is absent in a large part of rural India, and the state itself in many of these, leaving millions at the mercy of moneylenders and Maoists. And, even as the government doles out billions of rupees in the multitude of development schemes targeted at Bharat’s aam aadmi, a rent-seeking political economy around the benefit system threatens to undo all good intentions.
As we celebrate India’s 64th Independence Day, and almost two decades of operating a market economy, we thought it appropriate to theme the edition ?Village Republic: Changing Face of Rural India?, home to two-thirds of the Indian population.
FE reporters spanned across the country to bring you the changing economic, political and social lives in Indian villages?from shift in eating habits, advent of packaged goods consumption, changing livelihoods, telecom revolution to the often ugly industry-farm land dispute that can derail the whole process of industrialisation and urbanisation, the two essential components of India’s much avowed march towards global economic stardom.
Our columnists bring out, anecdotally and empirically, the flavour and insight into the distance our around six-lakh villages have covered in the past six decades, the potential and the unfinished business that needs to be attended to.