Abstract
The rural occupational structure of the Indian economy has witnessed a change between 2003 and 2013. Understanding the occupational diversification is the central part of understanding the nature of transitionary process in Indian economy. Focusing on the two different methods of occupational classification, the present article is an attempt to explain the patterns of diversification of the rural Indian economy. The questions raised here are: Is the share of household in the farm sector reducing, if yes, who is diversifying from the farm sector, which occupational groups are increasing their share. The present study uses the National Sample Survey’ (NSS) unit level data on Household Debt and Investment and identifies three different important partial movements in the rural Indian economy. One is the significant decline in the share of ‘Other’ household in the non-farm sector. These households might be the households with surplus who moved out of rural sector to the urban sector. The second movement is the decline in the share of agricultural labour households and movement towards increasing share of cultivators/self-employed in agriculture on the one hand and the growth of ‘Other Labour’ on the other hand. The third movement, if the mixed household represents plural households, is an increase in the mixed households in the ‘Other Labour’ category within this group. It has a larger policy implication.
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Notes
In scheduled 18.2 of the 59th round’s National Sample Survey (NSS) on Debt and Investment (January to December, 2003), NSSO classifies the rural households into five broad categories: self-employed in non-agriculture, agricultural labour, other labour, self-employed in agriculture and other. But the corresponding information is not same for the 70th round NSS on Debt and Investment. The other labour category of 59th round has been replaced by Regular wage/salary earning and Casual labour in non-agriculture. In order to make a comparison of the rural household type for these two rounds, we have added the Regular wage/salary earning and casual labour household together to form Other Labour household for 70th round.
In scheduled 18.2 of the 59th round’s National Sample Survey (NSS) on Debt and Investment (January to December, 2003), NSSO classifies the usual principal activity status into 14 major categories: Worked in household enterprises as own account worker, as employer, as helper, worked as regular salaried/wage employee, worked as casual wage labour in the public work and in the other type of work, did not work but was seeking and/or available for work, attended educational institutions, attended domestic duties only, attended domestic duties and was also engaged in free collection of goods (vegetables, roots, fire-wood, cattle feed etc.), sewing, tailoring, weaving etc. for house hold use, rentiers, pensioners, remittance recipients etc, not able to work due to disability, beggars and prostitutes. We have classified the first five categories as the working category and the rest as the non-working category. The non-working category has been omitted from the sample. The 70th round NSS on Debt and Investment (January to December 2013) gives only the first five categories.
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Bhue, C., Vijay, R. Occupational diversification in the rural sector between 2003 and 2013: some observations. Ind. J. Labour Econ. 60, 663–670 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-018-0116-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-018-0116-5