1 / 6

Income Inequality and ‘tunnel effects’ : the case of a dry-land Telugu village

Income Inequality and ‘tunnel effects’ : the case of a dry-land Telugu village . Nilotpal. Anantpur ; background info. . Dispatches from the village. No. of small farms (≤5 acres) grew by 151% between 1985-2005

mirit
Download Presentation

Income Inequality and ‘tunnel effects’ : the case of a dry-land Telugu village

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Income Inequality and ‘tunnel effects’ : the case of a dry-land Telugu village Nilotpal

  2. Anantpur; background info.

  3. Dispatches from the village • No. of small farms (≤5 acres) grew by 151% between 1985-2005 • But average groundnut yields/acre have declined by 33% (during 1988-93 and 2001-06) • So, a ≤ 5acres meta ryattuhas a gross return of Rs. 7,235 when the Chayanovian viability threshold is Rs. 19,455 (@ 2005 commodity prices), in a normal monsoon year. • And every 1 in 3 monsoon season fizzles out in this village and in villages around it

  4. Dispatches…… • So, being risk-averse under relative deprivation (i.e. not satisficing, Lipton 1982) , he participates in a ‘bore-well rush’: - 64.5% of HHs drilled a bore-well between 2000-2005 - no. of HHs drilling 2-3 wells in a single night abound - but only 34% HHs have had access to a thoTa - because of thefailure and volatility of bore-wells (every 2 of 3 attempts failed in sampled HHs) - it shows starkly Increasing social costs of groundwater irrigation for the late coming meta ryttu

  5. Risk-averseness under relative deprivation • But why do they take such risks: - citrus offers gross returns/acre 12-15 times that of dry groundnut (AP ranks 1st in citrus production) , - thus those 34% thoTa owing HHs are a ‘class’ in- themselves in Bourdieu’s sense (economic +non- economic capitals) - and this class, in local view, is able to somewhat ‘catch up’ with ‘town-people’ (median urban HH income in Andhra Pradesh is 2.3 times higher than that of rural HH, cf. IHDS data, 2004-05)

  6. Hirschman’s ‘tunnel effect’: costs of inequality • Implications of meta-thoTa-urban incomeinequalities : - All sampled small farm HHs indebted, average debt Rs. 51,600 (size and plot-location biases important to indebtedness) - High Status insecurity/volatility (Durkheim’s anomie operates in both directions- Pamurathi family’s case) - other-oriented violence and ‘water-disputes’ , local ideas of envy (asuya) - Self-oriented violence (cases of suicide) • Understanding these implications with ‘tunnel effect’: Hirschman’s proposition - a(n) individual’s/society’s tolerance to rising inequality is curvilinear and hence serious ( oppo. Rawls’ view)– the ‘local theory of chance in success, of envy’.The template of “direct action” here is not collective action but largely individualistic action.

More Related