Wage rates in the agricultural sector in India show wide variations across States. Further, the rates reported vary from source to source. Therefore, it has become difficult to have a realistic picture of the rates without a thorough scrutiny of the methods of collection of data, adjustments made for arriving at constant wages, etc. In the Kerala context, it is observed that rural wage rates are far higher than elsewhere and that their change over time is uneven across districts, even within the same district. Further, there exist different types of explanation for wage rate increases - rise in labour productivity, wage bargaining, and increasing consumer prices. Studies do not exist, however, about the dynamics of the agriculture labour market in the different parts of the State. There are reasons to suspect that besides the market forces of supply and demand and the extra-market interventions including wage bargaining, cultural factors such as caste and religious status also still play some role in different parts of the State. It is to examine the process of wage determination in two rural, local settings that A. A. Baby endeavours in his project The pattern of wage movement of rural, urban skilled and unskilled workers: a local level approach to study wage bargaining in Kerala. The study is being conducted in the predominantly rice-producing Pallassana panchayat of Palakkad district and the urbanising, commercial-cropping-dominated Madakkathara panchayat of Thrissur district.
The agricultural sector in Kerala has been undergoing a significant structural transformation from seasonal and annual crops to perennial cash crops. The shift seems to have had significant implications for the rural labour market. Demand for labour in agriculture has drastically come down with the decline of cultivation of rice and other seasonal crops. What are the changes taking place in the rural labour market in terms of spatial and occupational shifts? Have the shifts led to fall in rural wages? Is the rural labour market getting increasingly segmented? It is to these questions that R. Mahesh has turned in his project Labour mobility in rural areas. The fieldwork was completed in the Pallichal panchayat of Thiruvananthapuram district. The researcher has submitted the final research report.
The rural labour market in Kerala is undergoing significant structural changes. Decline in the area under rice cultivation, fragmentation of land holdings consequent on agrarian reforms, and partitioning of land holdings of households have reduced the average size of the farms to a few cents. These and similar changes have brought about rapid changes in cropping and land use patterns. The recent slump in rubber prices has led to retrenchment of workers. An important casualty of these developments is the displacement of farm labour. A survival strategy adopted by some such displaced agricultural labourers has been to lease in wet land for cultivation of seasonal cash crops such as banana, ginger, green vegetables, and betel vineyards. In an enquiry into the Betel cultivation on leased-in land by marginal farms and displaced agricultural labourers, Omana Cheriyan traces the origins of growth of betel vineyard cultivation, the recent changes in its organisational structures, their economic viability and the demand conditions for betal leaves. The study is conducted in Thumpamon north panchayat of Pathanamthitta district.
Working and living conditions of persons engaged in traditional household crafts are seldom discussed in studies. Thrissur is traditionally known for its products made out of screwpine leaves, clay, bamboo, and wood. K. A. Stephenson in his project Economics of labour in the traditional handicrafts industries of Kerala - a case study of Thrissur district is engaged in looking into the conditions of the rural artisan households that live by producing craft items using these materials. The survey is in progress.
This project is expected to shed light on the problems and prospects of these crafts which have successfully stood the test of time till now, thanks to the exquisite artistic quality of the products. Rubber, normally a large-scale plantation crop, is cultivated in Kerala in tiny holdings also as small farmers' crop.
Thousands of workers make a living as rubber tappers depending on these small farms. With the introduction of high-yielding hybrid varieties of rubber, tapping has become a highly skilled profession since defective methods of tapping lead to diseases of the trees and disorders in their growth and yields. Not only has tapping to be done skilfully, it has to be performed during specific hours of the day too; that is tapping is to be done during early hours of the day.
The problem remains, however, that tappers in small rubber holdings seldom get full time work and that their income levels remain meagre. It is to examine the work, wages, and employment conditions of tappers of small-scale rubber farms that T. V. Usha Devi has taken up the project Socio-economic profile of rubber tappers in the small holding sector in Kanjirappally panchayat of Idukki district. The study aims at examining the problems and prospects of rubber tapping by women workers. It is expected that the study would come up with suggestions for institutional intervention for ameliorating the conditions of the rubber-tapping workers.
Employment prospects of the educated persons both in rural and urban areas of the State are dim. Self-employment among them is slowly catching up in recent years. However, urban-rural differences, and differences arising from socio-economic and educational factors persist. The enquiry being made by Reji Raman in his project Motivating factors of the educated self-employed in Kerala addresses some of these questions. The study is based on field level data collected from 500 self-employed persons in Ernakulam district.
B. A. Prakash has been doing research on the project entitled Urban unemployment: a study of Kochi City. Kerala has the highest rates of unemployment of both the educated and the uneducated, and both in rural and urban areas, among the States of India. Prakash examines the question of urban unemployment in its various dimensions. He also makes effort to study the relationship between unemployment and the social, economic, and educational background of the unemployed and to estimate the waiting period of the educated unemployed. The concepts and definitions followed by National Sample Survey (NSS) regarding unemployment are used in this study. Based on a stratified sample of the wards of the Kochi City, information has been collected from 300 households. The information is being analysed and the report is expected by the end of 2000.
Alcoholism is a rising menace in the Kerala society. Consumption of liquor - particularly liquor of the spurious kind - has killed several hundreds of persons in the State in the past two decades. In the face of strong popular protests by the media, the government implemented ban in 1996 on consumption of arrack, which was supposed to be the main culprit in the growth of drunkenness, impoverishment of households, increase in morbidity levels, and destitution of women. The ban has had several repercussions, both positive and negative. An immediate result of the ban was the loss of jobs for several thousands of workers in arrack shops. But, women in poor households welcomed the ban due to hope of better days ahead as their men would not fritter money away on the bottle. However, things seem to have changed for the worse. Drunkenness has not come down, trade in spurious killer brews has become widely prevalent and the poor households are becoming destitute even faster. It is against this background that an enquiry into the Impact of closing down of arrack shops on households - a case study of Thrissur district has been taken up by M. Usha Devi. The specific objectives are the following: to study the impact of closing down of arrack shops on workers and the consumption levels of the households in the vicinity of the closed down shops; to find out whether the closing down has led to reduction of alcohol consumption in the localities concerned and if not why; and to examine the effect that the closing down has had on the earning levels of toddy tappers in the area. The work was started in October 1999 and is making good progress.
A paradox that social scientists have been trying to resolve in Kerala is the simultaneous existence of labour shortage and widespread unemployment among the youth, particularly in rural areas. The project entitled Village sustainable development was taken up by Rajan Gurukkal with a view not only to decomposing the paradox, but also to initiating an action plan for equipping the educated unemployed youth in a selected locality in Kottayam district to take up work on a team basis. The hypothesis was that unemployment among the educated was more the result of unemployability rather than non-availability of employment opportunities. Unemployment was caused by contempt for manual labour and the daily wage practice and the fear of job insecurity. Non-physical labour, monthly salary, and job security were considered prestigious. The researchers endeavoured through the project to bring about an attitudinal change among the unemployed youth through a series of experiments at training, conscientisation, co-operativisation, and financial support. Eventually, the trained youth were organised under a co-operative society and the researcher found work opportunities for them. However, the endeavour did not fully succeed: the attempt to transform the youth into an enterprising group did not materialise; attempts to persuade the local administration to take up responsibility of sustaining the work team could not succeed either. The major lessons drawn by the researcher are the following: educated youth remain unemployed not necessarily due to non-availability of opportunities but due to extra-economic factors; unwillingness to do physical labour does not arise from contempt, but from inability to do hard physical work; one-shot conscientisation effort or training is not enough to solve the problem; a discursive approach is essential; it is important not to instil false hopes of employment in the trainees. In fine, the prevailing notion of infra dig jobs dies hard; but co-operativisation is a promising avenue to fight this attitudinal malaise.
P. Krishnakumar undertook the project entitled Quality of life of the low income-group: a micro-level cross-sectional study, an intensive survey of two adjacent panchayats in the coastal area of Poovar in Thiruvananthapuram district. Besides investigating the levels of living of the households in the two selected panchayats, the researcher has also looked into the governmental and non-governmental organisations engaged in ameliorating the deprived conditions of the inhabitants. He has looked specifically into the question of gender inequality in the study area. The study has shown, as had been expected, that educational levels, rates of employment, household consumption levels, and housing conditions are poor in both the panchayats, but in one of them in which households own some landed property and engage in farming activities, as different from the other panchayat in which people live by traditional fishing, conditions are slightly better. This better off panchayat has also higher literacy levels, better housing conditions, and lower levels of alcoholism.
It is observed that credit facilities are poor, governmental and non-governmental interventions ineffective, and the urge on the part of the local inhabitants to strive for bettering their socio-economic status weak, though some difference is observed in this respect also, as between the two panchayats.
A message that this study tries to convey is that formulation and implementation of policies, designed at macro levels for improving the quality of life at the micro level are unlikely to become successful. The People's Planning Programme has brought a welcome change to the approach; but it has yet to fully reflect the needs and aspirations of the poor in specific contexts.
In the project People's participation in local level development and improvement in their quality of life, A. K. Jayasree gave a narrow definition to quality of life. According to her, physical and mental well being is the sure standard with which the quality of life of an individual could be measured. In her view, introduction of participatory planning at the local level in Kerala would not have made any dent in the poor health status of rural people. For verifying her hypothesis, five wards (three midland wards representing predominantly Hindus and two coastal wards one representing Christians and the other Muslims) from Vizhinjom panchayat in Thiruvananthapuram district were selected.
The method was one of participatory research. The study was done in two phases: the first consisting of a detailed qualitative investigation into the socio-economic conditions in general and health status in particular of the members of the households and the second an enquiry with active participation of the local population into the possibilities of improving their health and economic status. It was observed that the area suffered from basic problems such as high density of population, over-crowding of dwellings, low literacy levels of the population, and poor entertainment facilities. The major problems affecting the health status of the people included non-availability of safe drinking water, poor public hygiene and sanitary conditions, and poor and inadequate housing facilities. Employment opportunities for both men and women outside their traditional occupations such as fishing are low. While men engage themselves in agriculture and fishing, women find work in fish and vegetable vending, envelope-making and petty trade. In general, the levels of employment are low, but lower for women than for men. However, in terms of the burden of work, women are the greatest sufferers since they were found to work from 10 to 12 hours a day in domestic work - cooking, cleaning, attending children and the aged, drawing water from far off places and so on.
The overall health conditions are bad in the area; both acute and chronic diseases are rampant. Tensions arising from, say, drunkenness of husbands and the other male members, and problems of dowry payment for getting daughters married away, are constant causes of mental ill health for women. Reproductive morbidity caused by occupational hazards and malnutrition are quite common among women of all ages. Health care facilities are inadequate. Government hospitals are less costly and accessible to the poor. However, they have scant facilities in terms of physicians, medicines, and other essential facilities.
In the second phase of the project, the researcher made an attempt to organise women workers in the area into a coir-processing unit. Non-availability of credit facilities for meeting fixed as well as working capital requirements made the attempt abortive. Conscientisation efforts, medical camps, etc., were conducted with some success. People's Planning Programme has awakened the local people to their rights and responsibilities, but traditional inhibitions and power group politics have effectively managed to see that people's participation does not go beyond attendance in Grama Sabha meetings.