About the workshop

The workshop is aimed at discussing the socio-economic structure of rural India, the methodology of identifying various socio-economic classes and evidence from several village studies. It will start with discussing the limitations of the official sources of data in attempting the above and how these data sources use land size holding as a proxy for socio-economic classes. The workshop will highlight certain factors such as- control over means of production, relative use of family and hired labour, asset holdings, the surplus a household is able to generate within the reference period is important for determining these classes and the need for thorough data collection through village studies.

The workshop will use a unique village-level dataset created in the last one and half decade under the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI) through surveys across diverse agro-ecological zones. With the help of this dataset, two aspects will be addressed, firstly, the idea of differentiation in the countryside, and secondly, a detailed discussion on the method of classifying households in to different socio-economic classes such as- landlords, capitalist farmers, peasants, manual workers and others.

About the Resource Person

Arindam Das is Joint Director of the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS), Bengaluru. The Foundation’s major objectives are to facilitate and sponsor multi-disciplinary theoretical and empirical inquiry in the field of agrarian studies in India and elsewhere in less-developed countries.

Arindam Das has been associated with the village-studies for almost last 10 years and currently heads the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI). He is also pursuing his doctorate currently at the BITS, Hyderabad campus.

Arindam works with household-level primary data as well as macro-level secondary data. He has collaborated with national and international scholars for various research projects and has published a number of book chapters and journal articles.

His areas of interests involve socio-economic classes, rural incomes, wages, labour, rural farm and non-farm employment, cultivation cost and prices, cropping pattern, and productivity.

Students who want to participate in the workshop must register themselves by sending an e-mail to Professor Shamsher Singh at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by October 11, 2019,  5 p.m.

Only limited seats are available.