Abstract
This paper examines whether the emerging occupational structure in rural India is conducive for improving nutrition outcomes. Using data from India’s National Sample Survey Organisation’s survey of employment and unemployment conducted in 2009–2010, this paper establishes that there is greater dietary diversity, which is an intermediate outcome in the pathway to improved nutrition, among cultivators than among agricultural labourers. However, over time, there has been a reduction in the number of cultivators and an increase in the number of agricultural s. Since poverty is also concentrated among rural labour households, such shifts in occupational structure could prove to be detrimental to addressing the problem of malnutrition.
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Notes
The National Food Security Act 2013 seeks to ‘provide for food and nutritional security in human life cycle approach, by ensuring access to adequate quantity of quality food at affordable prices to people to live a life with dignity and for matters connected therewith or incidental thereto’. The Act is expected to tackle the problem of hunger and also protect poorer households from food price inflation.
Cultivation includes effective supervision or direction in cultivation. A person who has given out her/his land to another person or persons or institution(s) for cultivation for money, kind or share of crop and who does not even supervise or direct cultivation of land is not treated as cultivator. Similarly, a person working on another person's land for wages in cash or kind or a combination of both (agricultural labourer) is not treated as cultivator. Cultivation involves ploughing, sowing, harvesting, and production of cereals and millet crops such as wheat, paddy, jowar, bajra, and ragi; and other crops such as sugarcane, tobacco, ground-nuts, and tapioca; and pulses, raw jute, and kindred fibre crop, cotton, cinchona and other medicinal plants, fruit growing, vegetable growing or keeping orchards or groves, etc. Cultivation does not include the following plantation crops – tea, coffee, rubber, coconut, and betel-nuts (areca).
Those classified as market-oriented skilled agricultural and fishery workers can be further classified into one of the following groups: market gardeners and crop growers (NCO 3 digit code 611), market-oriented animal producers and related workers (NCO 3 digit code 612), market-oriented crop and animal producers (NCO 3 digit code 613), forestry and related workers (NCO 3 digit code 614), fishery workers, hunters and trappers (NCO 3 digit code 615). At the other end of the spectrum are subsistence agricultural and fishery workers (NCO 3 digit code 620).
These workers “grow and harvest field or tree and shrub crops, gather wild fruits and plants, breed, tend or haunt animals, produce a variety of animal husbandry products, cultivate, conserve and exploit forests, breed or catch fish and cultivate or gather other forms of aquatic life in order to provide food, shelter and income for themselves and their households”.
Dev and Kadiyala (2011) have argued that “realigning agriculture policy to empower women in agriculture is essential for accelerating reduction in under nutrition in India”.
There are three sources of consumption for rice and wheat, viz. from home produce, from public distribution system and purchases from the market.
Unlike the survey of consumption expenditure conducted by NSSO, the survey of employment and unemployment does not have information on physical quantity consumed or count of various food items consumed.
The results do not change if we use the Simpson index.
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Acknowledgments
This paper has been written as part of the research initiative ‘System of Promoting Appropriate National Dynamism for Agriculture and Nutrition’ (SPANDAN), which is housed in Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) and supported by a grant from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We are grateful to a referee of this journal for detailed comments on an earlier draft of the paper.
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Chandrasekhar, S., Mahendra Dev, S. & Pandey, V.L. Pathways from agriculture to nutrition: implications of the occupation structure in rural India. Ind. J. Labour Econ. 58, 529–543 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-016-0038-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-016-0038-z