Thakor community is hopeful that in the near future, with more such leasing opportunities from the Patels, they will be able to accumulate enough capital to venture into their own businesses
For the Patels, the aspirations of upward mobility within the community meant hierarchies of occupation which were always linked with the West. Representative photo: iStock. Praveen, hailing from Mehsana district of Northern Gujarat, along with his wife and two daughters, was found dead while allegedly trying to cross over to the US from Canada, according to media reports. Two other families from Kalol in Gandhinagar district also faced a similar fate in two separate incidents in 2022.
Most people here prefer going abroad for better opportunities since this part of the state is mostly dependent on agriculture and animal husbandry, said a relative of Praveen’s family.
This urge to migrate to find a new life in the West is evident in Gujarat, particularly among its farmers. While some of them are driven by the need to climb the income ladder, much of it is to uplift their social status in the community with a foreign tag.
In one of our field visits to Mehsana district of Gujarat to study water sustainability and agricultural practices, we surprisingly discovered that farmers there highlighted some other challenges. These were related to their prospects in the marriage market.
Also read: Match migrants’ skills with needs of ageing countries to drive global growth: World Bank report
The visit was part of a WIN Foundation (a non-profit organisation)-funded project across some villages of Mehsana district. The aim was to study the water usage patterns for agricultural practices.
The villages were part of the 57 blocks declared as ‘dark zone’ by the Gujarat government in 2003. Dark zones are identified as over-exploited and critical blocks in the state where the groundwater level has significantly gone down.
In 2003, the government issued a directive banning power connections for farming to regulate water use and prevent over-extraction of water. Only a handful of borewells were permitted to operate in the region with attached conditionalities of compulsory micro-irrigation system.
This ban was lifted in 2012, permitting easy installation of borewells with eight hours of electricity every day for agricultural purposes, according to a 2019 research.
The two major farming communities in the villages we visited are the Patels and Thakors. The Patels comprise 12 per cent of Gujarat’s population and traditionally belong to the agrarian community.
They own ‘pattas’ (strips of land), and their primary occupation has been farming. The Thakor community, on the other hand, constitutes the largest caste of the ‘Other Backward Class’ categories in Gujarat.
Both these communities have gained economically from the upliftment of the dark zone. Now there is at least one borewell in every 100 metres, and 95 per cent of the farmers are using borewells to irrigate their crops.
Easy access to water has changed the crop pattern from food grain to widely grown cash crops. Earlier, farmers produced mainly for their subsistence, which has now shifted to more water-intensive cash crops such as tobacco, groundnut, castor and cotton.
Farmers believed that with the government permitting more borewell installations, farming has now become easy. The subsequent shift to cash crops has indeed led to more farm income in this part of the state, according to some of the farmers.
However, for the Patels, the aspirations of upward mobility within the community meant hierarchies of occupation which were always linked with the West. Since the Land Ceiling Act was enforced in Gujarat in the 1960s, the Patel community has always felt a need to move to the West.
Under the act, with any expansion of the families, the landholdings of the otherwise rich Patels started to decrease, and agriculture no longer remained a lucrative option for them, according to a 2016 study.
The migration rates increased, and soon, the community became one of the dominant Indian diasporas abroad, with about 1.7 million Patels living in the US as of 2017, according to a 2015 research.
Lately, it is not just the livelihood but increased competition in the marriage market. The demand for a foreign-based groom has increased the overseas migration multi-fold. The ‘Patel farmers’, who could not migrate to the West, face a bigger social problem of not being able to find a suitable bride for themselves.
The plight of the Patels now is that despite belonging to a higher class and a land-owning community, their social recognition as a farmer is not something they look forward to. The problem is further magnified by Gujarat’s skewed sex ratio of 955 females per 1,000 males, according to the National Family Health Survey-5 (2019-21).
“Even if I have 100 bighas of land and earn Rs 25 lakhs annually from agriculture, I still won’t be able to get married because girls do not want to marry a farmer,” said a farmer.
They only want to marry someone who is settled or planning to settle in the US, Canada and Australia. The women might be uneducated, but I have to have a government job or a life in the West to sustain in the marriage market, he added.
“We have 50 villages in two neighbouring districts, atleast one person from four-five villages here move to US everyday,” said another villager.
Interestingly, this issue did not mirror our discussions with the farmer community of ‘Thakor’. The Thakors live in the periphery of the same village, closer to the Sabarmati River, and represent the relatively disadvantaged sections of the society.
They have primarily been causal labourers in the Patel community’s agricultural land, and their tendency to move from their villages to cities has always been minimal, let alone moving to a foreign land, according to a 1992 study. They, contrary to the Patel community, indicate a different dynamic to fit within the agricultural community of the village. They wanted to be recognised as farmers.
Thakors typically worked as labourers on the land of a Patel farmer. A few of the Thakors, who are marginal farmers, have mostly in the past relied on the Patel community’s borewell for obtaining water; else, they were dependent on the monsoon.
Their farms are situated in the ravine areas. As a result, they have lost a significant proportion of their lands to the Sabarmati River. The ravine area is also marred with challenges such as relatively infertile soil, water clogging during monsoons and scarcity of groundwater storage.
They do not have the resources to fight against the forces of nature. But, lifting the ban on the dark zone has changed their approach to agriculture. They have obtained government permissions, created partnerships within their community to install their borewells, and started foraying into cash crop cultivation.
This has increased their income and sense of ownership in agriculture. Along with the sharecropping, which they continue to practice, they are now farmers in their own land.
Interestingly, the mechanisms that are taking away the newer generations of the Patel community from agriculture have created an additional space for the Thakor community to flourish. This can be observed with the Patel community now starting to rent out their land to the Thakors for cultivation.
As the Patels move out of the country and eventually move out of agriculture, they lease out their land to the Thakors in exchange for approximately Rs 10,000 per ha per year. The lease amount varies depending on the soil fertility as well as the availability of water sources. Through this system, Thakors get an opportunity to expand their agricultural base and hence their income.
They do not have the necessary capital to start their own businesses, and neither their limited exposure to education can fetch them a remunerative job. They look at Patels’ migration as a prospect to uplift their own living standards. They see this as a chance to move from being a casual labourer to a farmer.
The Thakor community is hopeful that in the near future, with more such leasing opportunities from the Patels, they will be able to accumulate enough capital to venture into their own businesses. Eventually, this will be a way out of their poverty trap. The same is reflected in our in-depth discussions with villagers from the Thakor community:
“We really want the Patels to migrate. If they migrate, we get their fertile lands which already have borewell/water connections on lease at a very minimum price. This is a win-win for both the communities — we get to earn more, and they get to secure their land with us,” said a farmer.
Overall, our interactions made it evident that although these two communities are separated by class, recognition and future aspirations, they are deeply connected with an underlying dynamic of redistribution of usage rights of agricultural lands that led to foraying in and out of agriculture. In this game, both face a non-zero-sum game if migration to the West becomes feasible for one.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth
Deepak Singhania and Shradhda Jain are associated with IIT Gandhinagar, while Soumi Roy Chowdhury is currently working with Janaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy. The authors are grateful to the WIN Foundation for supporting this work.
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