Labour Use in Rural India-A Study of Spatial and Temporal Variations

A Study of Spatial and Temporal Variations A Vaidyanathan This paper examines inter-state and inter-district variations in total labour input into agriculture per unit of area and the reasons for these variations. Also discussed are the determinants of rural non-agricultural employment. There exist quite large regional variations in the ratio of non-agricultural to total employment in rural areas and an exploration of the reasons underlying these variations could hopefully provide some basis for judging how far they are amenable to manipulation by policy Salient Features of Labour Use in Rural India FOR a long time the decennial population rensuses were the only source of information on the pattern of employment in rural India: Every census gives some idea of the proportion of rural population engaged in economic activity, and their distribution by sector of employment. Pretty detailed sectoral break-up of the working population is generally available upto the state level though at the district level only broad sectoral pattern of employment is published. However, problems of determining the activity status of particular individuals, the fact that workers often do several types of work covering different 'sectors', and the difficulties of capturing the intensity of employment in a short questionnaire administered at a single point of time have severely limited the usefulness of their data. In order to overcome these problems, the NSS took up intensive surveys of a scientifically selected sample of the population from rural and urban areas all over India. Though these surveys were started in the fifties, it took time to evolve suitable standardised concepts and procedures