Paper short abstract:

This paper is based on a re-survey of Zanjiya village in Gondia district of Maharashtra. This paper attempts to analyse some aspects of labour and employment at the level of one village between 1957 and 2007.

Paper long abstract:

This paper deals with some aspects of labour and employment in agriculture at the level of one village in eastern Maharashtra. It is based on data collected from a re-survey of Zanjiya village in Gondia district, which was part of larger research project on agrarian change in eight villages of Maharashtra, based at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. This paper tries to address the following issues: a) changes in the distribution of work force; b) changes in labour absorption and family labour use in paddy cultivation; c) average number of days of employment in agricultural and non-agricultural activities; and d) growing sector of non-agricultural employment for daily wage labourers. Over the period of fifty years, the dependency on agriculture in terms of source of employment declined sharply. High-yielding Varieties and the modern cultivation patterns increased the average number of days of labour required for paddy cultivation in the village. However, such an increase in labour absorption did not reflect on the average number of days of agricultural employment for agricultural labourers. Outside agriculture, wage labourers from the village were pulled by two main driving forces in the nearby towns: i.e., bricks-kilns and construction work. As a result, the overall number of days of employment (in agriculture and non-agriculture) per worker in the village increased substantially.