Republic of India Livelihoods in intermediate towns
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- 5.5: Communities and Non-farm Occupations
- Table 8: Year of Starting the Non-farm Economy
- Table 9: NFE Categories and Caste / Communities
- Table 10: Social Profile of Respondents in the Sample-survey Caste Groups
5.4: How Old Are They? The practice non-farm economic activity does not seem to be very old either of the settlements and appears to have grown during the past 25 years or so, especially after 1990, and more so in the past 15 years. As is evident from Table 8, as many as many as 79 percent of them reported starting their work after 1991 and among them, 68 percent after 2001. This pattern finds relevance across communities.5.5: Communities and Non-farm Occupations: One of the obvious underlying assumptions about the social dimension of economic change in the process of a shift from farm to non-farm economic activity is the process of “secularization” or “modernization” of occupational identities. Employment in modern societies ought to be based on individual merit and choice and not on one’s caste community identity. While the traditional agrarian economy is structured around caste, non-farm economy is seen as more likely to be a matter of individual choice and ability.
This, however, does not seem to be the case. As is evident from Table 4 above, a little more than 15 percent of all enterprises were strictly, a continuation of the old caste or community occupations, such as the barbers, shoe repairmen or basket makers. However, a close look at the data (see Appendices 1 and 2) shows that a large majority of those working in the non-farm economy come from specific caste community backgrounds. For example, members of the Sonar caste own nearly all the jewelry shops. Similarly the traditionally upper caste and rich communities - Marwaris, Brahmins, Rajputs, and those from the trading castes (Suris and Telis, officially listed as OBC) own almost all the upper-end businesses in the two settlements. On the other end, a large proportion of daily wage labourers are from the lower castes – Dalits and EBCs, low caste Muslim communities and a significant number of women. In absence of men, who have migrated out to work, women work both in the family farms and as wage labourers, mostly to undertake local agricultural labour. Interestingly, the proportion of Scheduled Caste respondents in the non-farm activity who explicitly pursued caste based traditional occupation is much higher (42%) than “others” (19.38%). If we also add daily wage labour in the category of their traditional occupation, which it has been, it becomes as high as 60 per cent. Among Muslims too, a large proportion (32%) pursue occupations that the local community identified as traditional (such as tailors and butchers) (for details see Table 9). Similarly, a large majority of women (74%) too are either in traditional occupations or in jobs identified with women, such as food related, vegetable and fruit vendors and beauty-cosmetics. Interestingly, except for a few variables, patterns observed in two settlements are not very different. Perhaps the most important difference reported by our respondents between the two settlements is the proportion of them pursuing traditional family occupations, which is much larger in Bhagwatipur (20%) than in Satghara (11%). This would suggest that the proportion of new entrants is much larger in the Census Town of Satghara than in the rural settlement of Bhagwatipur. A larger proportion of our respondents from Bhagwatipur worked from self-own building (21%) than Satghara (21%). But the proportion of respondents reported working alone is larger in Bhagwatipur (72%) than in Satghara (61%). Given its rural character, a much larger proportion of the respondents in Bhagwatipur (22.5%) reported being simultaneously active in the local agrarian economy (as farmers/ sharecroppers/labourer) than in Satghara (8.5%). A large majority of the respondents from OBC communities in Bhagwatipur own some amount of agricultural land.
Community and caste diversity exists only in certain categories of non-farm occupations. These include activities such as mobile repair, modern electronic and communication related services, vehicle repair, medicine-related occupations, vegetable and fruit sellers and driver/ transport. However, here also we can easily observe community specific exclusions in some of these occupational categories. For example, there is no SC respondent in the technology, mobile phone or communication related occupations. Similarly, we find very few Muslims, SCs or women in relatively modern categories or high investment oriented occupations, such as those related to medicine and health, education or construction and hardware. Even though a range of communities own grocery and other utility shops, they are dominated by relatively upper and trading castes that have been traditionally involved with such work. The same holds good for food related outlets, which tended to be from specific castes and communities. Apart from visible and not so visible divisions and differences of non-farm activities in accordance with the logic of traditional hierarchies of caste and communities, we also noticed active discrimination against some communities in relation to certain occupations. For example, it is very difficult for a Muslim or a person of ex-untouchable community to establish and operate a successful restaurant or to sell processed food. Even though Muslims exclusively own all the raw chicken and meat shops (butcher) and members of different Hindu communities patronize these shops as clients, according to the Muslim respondents, no one would come and eat if the Muslims were to run a restaurant and sell cooked food. We could find only two Muslim respondents running eateries - a paan shop and another one selling biscuits and cigarettes/ bidis in Muslim dominated localities in Bhagwatipur.
The Muslim respondents were aware of such an exclusion and several of the respondents told us that if they were to open a food related shop or a restaurant, they would be unable to run it because it was most likely that they wouldn’t get any customers. Catching and selling fish is also a community specific occupation, an exclusive “monopoly” of the Mallah, an EBC caste group. Some of the Muslim respondents also complained about not being able to get shops on rent in the main market because of their community background. Yüklə 2,26 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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