‘Villages without agriculture’ is a term my friend from JNU, Rajnish, coined to describe his native village of Narharpur in Bihar. He was saying that agrarian distress in Bihar villages is so high that majority of people have diversified their sources of income. Share of agricultural income to total income is often quite small and it has a lot of do with the overall low profitability from agriculture.

We were in Rajnish’s village at that time and planning to commission a survey on groundwater economy in three neighboring villages.  Before a survey, we decided to do a complete house-listing of all households in our three study villages in Vaishali district. The idea was to use this census results for further sampling. The preliminary results of the census are just in and yes, agricultural incomes are indeed a relatively small share of total income. Our villages are perhaps not entirely representative…