Articles by Pallavi Chavan

Examining the different phases of growth and distribution of cooperative credit in Maharashtra between the 1960s and 2000s, this paper tries to understand the multiple dimensions of the phenomenon in the state—across regions, crops, ownership and size classes of land, and social groups. Although Maharashtra has been leading in the expansion of credit cooperatives, this has been marked by a distinct bias in favour of Western Maharashtra where cash crops, particularly sugar cane are grown. The process has largely eluded Eastern and Central Maharashtra, where cotton and other crops are grown.

This paper examines credit to agriculture provided by the commercial banks, including regional rural banks, and finds that contrary to the general perception that the credit revival began in 2004, the actual revival started after 2000. The increase in credit was to a large extent the result of a growing share of indirect finance, which, in turn, has been broadened in scope to cover many new kinds of farm lending. Moreover, even as direct lending to agriculture has also grown, there has been a sharp increase in the share of large-sized advances for financing agri-businessoriented enterprises, rather than for the small and marginal farmers.

This paper examines the trends in agricultural wages in India from 1964-65 to 1999-2000, using data from Agricultural Wages in India and Rural Labour Enquiry, after dealing with the limitations of the AWI data. The trends show that there was a slowdown in the rate of growth of real daily wages of male and female agricultural labourers in more than half of the districts in the sample in the 1990s. Earlier, there was a striking rise in the growth of daily real earnings across all states between 1983 and 1987-88. Second, there was a rising trend in the variations in real wages across districts in the 1990s. Third, the differences between the average wages of male and female agricultural labourers have widened over the years. Fourth, the daily wages of male agricultural labourers exceeded the minimum wage levels in most states, while those of women were below the minimum in most states.

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