Structural Change and Rural Households in India: An Analysis of the Nature of Transformation in Their Economic Activities

The rural economy in India has been witnessing a transformation in terms of a shift in the economic activities undertaken by members of the household. This paper looks into this transformation during the period 1993–94 to 2011–12. In order to look at the transformation within households, we take households as the unit of analysis and analyse the changes that occur within households. We use the NSS unit-level data of Employment–Unemployment rounds for the analysis. There is a shift from agriculture sector to non-agriculture sector employment in case of males. For females too, the share in agricultural employment declined but the corresponding rise was in two activities, education and domestic activities. The near stagnancy of employment in manufacturing, transport, storage and communication and financial and other services, both for males and females, point to the lack of diversification of output growth in the rural areas, which in turn signals the lack of interlinkage with the urban sector. It can be seen that the rural households, from being agricultural households with a rudimentary division of labour and limited specialization within the households, there is increasing division of labour both within the household and in the production site. Within the household, the functions of caregiving and social reproduction is increasingly becoming a specialized activity of the women in the household, while male members engage in economic activity. The typical male HoH is now moving away from agriculture to non-agricultural sources of livelihood, and the sons in these households are moving towards acquiring better levels of education, which probably by the next generation would accentuate the process of shift to non-agricultural employment among males. Meanwhile, the concentration of women in the domestic sector may get further enhanced.