Year: 2014 | Month: July | Volume 59 | Special Issue
Contractual Arrangements in Agricultural Labour Market: Some Lessons from Tarai Regions of U.P. and Uttaranchal
Abstract:
The new farm technology has created avenues for contractual arrangements in labour and land markets. Contractual agricultural wage labourers have an incentive for better earnings but it is necessary to supervise them closely which involves cost. Recently, the group contract is emerging in different regions for various agricultural activities. Keeping in view these facts in mind, the present paper is an attempts to study the organization, functioning, pattern of employment and earning of Agricultural Labour under Contractual arrangements in Tarai regions of U.P. and Uttaranchal. Two districts have been selected purposively to represent the whole Tarai belt, namely Udham singh Nagar (Uttaranchal) and Sidharth Nagar (Uttar pradesh). Out of these two selected districts one block from each district has been selected randomly. From these two blocks, three villages from each block have been selected randomly subject to the availability of sufficient numbers of labour households. Thus, 150 labour households have been selected randomly from the lists of labour households prepared from six villages. To study the organisation and functioning of contractual labour, engaged in various activities have been identified .The data is collected from the labour house hold involves in contractual arrangements for the year 1999-2000. The findings of the study reveals that due to more earning in all the agricultural operations performed on contractual basis, the labourers formed a group consisting male and female workers of a family and neighbourers family workers. The group leader usually bargains the terms, conditions and amount of payments for certain activities. However, the wage rates are fixed for most of the piece rate jobs and on that basis, the group of labour is getting employment opportunity. Thus, due to no time limit of work, they have the opportunity to get more employment and earnings by way of engaging themselves in various agricultural activities. It was also observed that they are tempted to engage themselves in contractual arrangements so that they may able to get more employment and income. The possibilities of increasing income of workers are much brighter if they get the employment under contractual arrangements.
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