‘If Not Agriculture, Then What?’: Agrarian Change, Welfare Populism and Peasant Farming in Odisha

Indian agriculture has experienced remarkable transformation in both scale and speed in recent decades due to neoliberal reforms, signifying a shift towards an urban–industrial–capitalist economy. This transformation has sparked a renewed discussion on the survival and death of peasantry, a persistent issue in agrarian studies for over a century. While one set of scholars advocates the notion of the peasantry’s demise, another contends that the peasantry persists in rural India despite rapid agricultural transformation. Based on an empirical exercise carried out in two villages of Odisha, this study contends that agrarian transformation in India exhibits non-uniform and complex trends. Agriculture is the primary source of livelihood and employment in rural areas, with the rural sector predominantly comprised of small-scale agricultural producers. While the marginalisation and gradual decline of the peasantry is evident, this study suggests that a new cohort, primarily from scheduled castes, has replaced the upper and cultivating caste farmers who have exited the sector, and this new cohort is able to survive due to the expansion of non-farm opportunities, pluri-activities and state-extended populist welfare measures.