Research

Changing agriculture, changing politics

An abiding theme of my research has been the interface between the agrarian economy of a developing country and its political economy. Why don’t fast-accumulating, capitalist farms displace small, family labur-based farms? This paper investigates why farms of peasant proprietors do not get bought over by capitalist farmers; while this paper shows, in a game theoretic setting, that share cropping can be a resilient institution as opposed to capitalist farming.

Two other papers probe a related question: what has been the nature of accumulation of capital in Indian agriculture? The first paper argues that the pace of accumulation has been modest (published in a festschrift for Prabhat Patnaik). The reason for the slow pace can be partly attributed to a certain slackening of public investment. Accumulation of capital can take the form of more intensive cultivation -- i.e., ‘concentration’ of capital as opposed to ‘centralisation’ of land. This paper investigates the first possibility by probing asset distribution of farm households over time.

As forces and relations of agrarian production undergo changes the balance of class forces within agriculture and without gets affected. This article, jointly written with Deepankar Basu, is a rejoinder to a commentary by Partha Chatterjee on the contemporary political economy of India. In another paper, written jointly with Basu, the political programme of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) has been examined. Transformation of Assam's agrarian economy, shaped by colonialism, was the theme of a paper written with my historian colleague Arupjyoti Saikia.

Famine, food, farmers

This paper argues that during the Bengal Famine of 1943 a reason for the sharp rise of food price was the coupling of food market and land market. In recent times although India’s per capita income is rising, calorie consumption per head has been declining. This commentary piece with Basu considers different explanations of this phenomenon. A paper with Basu traces the history of food provisioning in India through market and non-market means. It argues that the distribution of food through Public Distribution System (PDS) is not a lost cause. This paper, written jointly with Basu, argues that a reason why the PDS functions relatively well in some Indian states is that the poor and socially marginalised sections have access to the PDS in these states. Theoretically, the result stems from lexicographic ordering of preference, minimum requirement of certain essential commodities. Built on a similar set of assumptions this paper investigates the rapid growth of the services sector in India.

Deceleration in Indian agriculture has found expression in a number of ways, including suicides by farmers. This paper, written jointly with Deepankar Basu and Kartik Misra, examines the year-wise and state-wise variations in farmer suicide rate and argues that the previous estimations of farmer suicide rate were incorrect.

The macro picture: employment, accumulation and profit

The low rate of job creation in industries has been a cause of concern. This paper, written jointly with Basu, decomposes changes in employment elasticity in terms of changes happening in different sectors of the economy. We use macroeconomic data of India and the US to measure the individual and aggregate components of employment elasticity change.

Understanding macroeconomic changes through the lens of heterodox economics has been an interest. This paper extends the short-run equilibrium model of Amitava Bose to an open economy set-up. It argues that conquest of the First World market by the mass industrial products of Third World can occur at the cost of rising income inequality in the Third World. Applying analytical tools of Marxist and post-Keynesian economics this paper finds that investment in India’s organised manufacturing sector has been driven by profit share and technical progress in the long run, and by market demand in the short run. Relatedly, in this paper it's argued that in the long run the profit rate has been driven by changes in the profit share, in the short run technological and demand changes have had a major influence.