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AWSAR Awarded Popular Science Stories - 2019
Fig. 2. Proportion of young agricultural labourers to main workers.
so are not only material but also intellectual, as a lack of intellectual satisfaction from farming and poor image of agriculture also counted as significant constraints in the study. Most of the respondents expressed a low level of intellectual satisfaction from agriculture (58.06% in UP and 45.83% in
Bihar). Intellectual satisfaction from service or business was found to be significantly higher than that from agriculture. About 38.33% and 20% of the youth respondents in UP and Bihar, respectively, stated they would not pursue agriculture at any cost even if it was profitable.
Further researchers took
an insight into the impact of
migration on migrants. When
an individual migrates, he or
she goes through a number
of changes in his or her micro-sociological system.
This study went deeper into understanding the changes in
the overall socioeconomic and
psychological system of the youth migrants at the individual level.
Both positive and negative impacts could be traced out through analysing the differences between migrated and nonmigrated respondents, and also the before-after comparison among the migrated respondents using suitable psychometric and statistical tools. The study found the overall deterioration of the social connectedness of the respondents after migration. For the rest of the variables, there were differences in the results between the two states. Unlike Bihar, more respondents in UP had benefited from migration by having a reduced stress level and increased socioeconomic status, standard of living, income and employment level. A positive association was found between the pre-migration socioeconomic status of respondents and the difference in socioeconomic status after migration. This indicated a scenario of growing inequality as those who already had higher socioeconomic
status before migration enjoyed more gain in socioeconomic status as a result of migration. The gain in socioeconomic status was also higher in UP than in Bihar. To find an explanation for this peculiarity, we peeped deeper into the data, and the pre- and post- migration occupational status of the respondents were sorted out. It reflected that a greater proportion of respondents from UP were engaged in service sector, business or continuing higher education, while in the case of Bihar, more were employed as factory labourers or construction labourers. None was found to be in continuing
education. The proportion of forced migration and seasonal migration was also higher in Bihar, with a greater number of respondents
The overall scenario indicates that India is losing young cultivators, but the number of casual labourers is increasing, indicating an even worse situation where youth do not have farm management power and are involved only in menial labour work with minimal income. The lack of employment opportunities may be pushing them to work as casual labourers in farms.