From Breadwinner to Daily-Wage Labourer: The Tragic Degradation of Rural Dignity
N. Singh · ·3 min read
Translated from the original Hindi · मूल हिंदी लेख पढ़ें
Go to any large construction site or brick kiln in a village.
Who is that labourer carrying 12 bricks on his head, feeding them into the kiln’s fire?
He is no professional labourer. If you ask him, he will tell you that until ten years ago, he too owned 4 bighas of land, two pairs of oxen, and farmed with pride alongside his family.
But what happened then? To treat his father’s illness, two bighas of land were mortgaged to a moneylender and never came back. A bank loan was taken for his daughter’s wedding; then hail destroyed the crops two years in a row; the bank issued a recovery warrant, and the remaining land, too, had to be sold off for a pittance.
Today, he is no ‘annadata’ [provider of food]. Today, he is a helpless bonded labourer enduring the contractor’s abuses for a daily wage of ₹300.
In sociology and economics, this process is known as ‘proletarianisation’—that is, turning the peasant into a wage labourer.
From Field to Kiln: A Saga of Social Degradation
In the tenth chapter of his book ‘Ujadti Kheti, Ujadte Gaon’ [Devastated Farms, Devastated Villages], author N. Singh dissects this social tragedy.
In India, a farmer is not merely an economic unit. In an Indian village, land represents a farmer’s ‘self-respect’ and his ‘civic identity’. One who owns land does not stretch his hands out before anyone. He sits in society with his head held high.
Yet, when a farmer is stripped of his land due to flawed policies, unbridled inflation, and unseasonal calamities, it leads not only to his economic ruin, but the utter collapse of his social dignity.
He stands in line to dig ditches under MGNREGA, where he has to plead before the Rozgar Sevak [village employment assistant] and the secretary for a ₹200 daily attendance.
The Bitter Truth from the Book
“It is no accident that the farmer is turning into a labourer. This is the outcome of a deliberate, market-driven policy. Big corporates need an army of crores of cheap, unorganised labourers for their factories, real estate, and construction sites. If the farmer remains self-reliant and prosperous in his village, why would he go to sweat for 12 hours a day in the cities? Agriculture is therefore deliberately being turned into a losing proposition so that the rural population is forced to abandon its land and work as wage labourers before the capitalists.”
— ‘Ujadti Kheti, Ujadte Gaon’ (Chapter 10)
What is the Real Solution?
- Complete ban on land auctions due to debt: A legal prohibition must be imposed on auctioning a farmer’s sole agricultural land—the very source of his livelihood—in the name of debt recovery.
- Rural Crisis Relief Fund: In situations of drought, flood, or crop failure, bank recovery must be automatically frozen for 3 years, with the interest borne by the government.
- Land Restoration Act: Fast-track revenue courts should be set up to restore the lands of marginal farmers that have been illegally mortgaged or usurped by moneylenders.
A Question Worth Pondering (The Book’s Message)
If the very hands that once grew food to feed the entire nation must now stretch out before others for their own daily bread, does any nation have the moral right to call itself a ‘Vishwaguru’ [world teacher] or a ‘superpower’? To understand this piercing truth, do read the tenth chapter of the book ‘Ujadti Kheti, Ujadte Gaon’.
Stripping a farmer of his land is not merely taking away a property; it is stripping him of his freedom, his self-respect, and his social identity, and casting him into the furnace of capital.