rural population

Abstract

Habitat: United Nations Conference of Human Settlements, held in Vancouver in 1976, recommended that 'A national policy for human settlements and the environments should be an integral part of any national economic and social development policy.

In this chapter we use the village household survey data to quantify the effects of the green revolution on farm production, income, and employment; the changes in family income and consumption of farm and nonfarm households; and the changes in the distribution of land. There are four problems with the data set that complicate our task.

North Arcot district which embraces the study region, lies in the northwest of Tamil Nadu state. It is a relatively densely populated region; in 1981 the population density was 357 persons per square kilometer of land. It is also a relatively poor region within India.

In this study we set out to quantify the effects of the green revolution on the North Arcot region, in both the villages and the towns. For this task we had available a unique set of data obtained from household surveys undertaken in 1973/74, 1982/83, and 1983/84, which together span an era of change in the region's paddy technology.

In a predominantly agrarian region, development of the nonfarm economy is materially affected by the development of the agricultural sector. Agriculture supplies food, raw materials, and surplus labor for agro-industry. Agriculture also supplies the financial resources necessary to the organization of nonfarm firms.

This chapter uses an estimated social accounting matrix (SAM) to provide a detailed quantitative description of the North Arcot study region in 1982/83. The SAM framework provides a consistent, comprehensive, and detailed picture of the transactions in an economy.

Technological change, such as the replacement of traditional with modern crop varieties and introduction of irrigation, has been effective in increasing the yields and production of various crops— notably rice and wheat—as well as incomes of farmers in developing countries (Pinstrup-Andersen 1982; Pinstrup-Andersen and Hazell 1985; Lipton 1989).

Agricultural technologies of the "green revolution" type have brought substantial direct benefits to many developing countries. Prominent among these has been increased food output, sometimes even in excess of the increasing food demands of a growing population.