IASSI-Quarterly
Year : 2023, Volume : 42, Issue : 4
First page : ( 708) Last page : ( 738)
Print ISSN : 0970-9061. Online ISSN : 0974-018X.

Agrarian Relation, Institutional Credit and Peasant Class Differentiation: A Study of West Bengal, India

Nanda Gouriprasad¹

¹Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Umeschandra College, Kolkata, Email: nandagouriprasad@gmail.com

Online Published on 09 February, 2024.

Abstract

The institutional credit has been devised to play a crucial role in the rural development of India. The public policy on rural credit in India has been focused on institutionalization as a means of providing cheaper credit to farmers. However, the persistence of moneylenders in the rural credit market is still a major concern. This paper is based on a primary field survey and deal with the nature and extent of peasant class differentiation and the nature of access of rural households to rural finance alternatives in West Bengal. Accessibility and distribution of credit will be our major concerns of investigation. We shall try to also explore the role of institutional credit in the process of differentiation. This helps us to understand whether there exists any biased socio-economic framework to access rural finance facilities. In an attempt to study and analyse the ground situation, this study undertook a detailed analysis of all relevant variables to examine the structure of investment and production taking place in West Bengal. The other objective of this paper is to enquire whether there exists any contradiction in objective and principle, the practice of Microfinance run by Government or private or panchayat or cooperative leading to creation of obstacles in the realization of rural development goals. The sample households collected from relatively advanced and backward areas are distributed according to economic classes defined by Patnaik (1976) side by side with the standard acreage groupings. Subsequently, we explored the degree of association between the two criteria and found that the two criteria of households are associated with each other but they are not identical. The analysis in this paper would help us to know first of all, to highlight the agrarian relation and peasant class differentiation in West Bengal on a sample of diversely developed regions. Second, to what extent households are dependent on private sources of credit vis-à-vis the institutional sources, Third, whether credit absorption has something to do with the intensity of class differentiation.

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Keywords

Rural credit, Institutional credit, Class differentiation, Agrarian relation.

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