Organising agricultural labourers in India : a proposal

Some time in the middle of 1977 the Economics Faculty of the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, chalked out a program to bring out a joint work on rural development. As a sequel to this the faculty members were requested to present papers on topics of their choice keeping in view the broad perspective of the problems involved in rural development. As a person working in the area of labour economics, I considered that study of the problems of agricultural labourers in the perspective of rural development would be within my professional competence. Accordingly, a paper entitled "Unionising Agricultural Labourers: A Strategy" was presented at a staff seminar and was later published in The Indian Journal of Industrial Relations. While working on a paper on another aspect of the problem of organising agricultural labour I took the opportunity affor ded by National Labour Institute (NLI), New Delhi, to attend a rural labour camp organised in March-April 1978 near Mysore. My exposure to the teaching techniques followed by NLI and my discussions with the rural labourers who had come there to participate in the camp widened my horizons regarding the problems of agricultural labourers and the need and the methods to be adopted to organise them. It occurred to me at one stage that it would be a fruitful endeavour to write a little more comprehensive work than an article on the topic. The present work is the result of this decision.