Ethnicity, off-farm income and resource use in the semi-subsistence farming system of Kaski District, Nepal

Abstract

In recent decades agrarian restructuring has become a near-ubiquitous phenomenon and often a major development objective in much of the Third World, as villages and village households have turned from dependence on subsistence farming towards greater dependence on small-scale commercial agriculture and off-farm employment. Whatever the particular characteristics and causes, the process of change has often been highly selective : led by those households which are better educated, better ‘connected’ to political elites, more skilled, wealthier, more ready to take risks with capital, or more prepared to take up distant employment. This study is centred on two neighbouring villages in Kaski District of central Nepal, where economic change in the past 30 years has to a large extent stemmed from the injection of relative wealth, acquired by Gurung households from the service pay and army pensions earned by present and former Gurkha soldiers, serving in the British and Indian armies. The economic changes from this cause are recent. The study investigates an early stage in the process of agrarian restructuring. One salient factor, pursued in the core chapters-(3, 4 and 5), has been the circulation of Gurungs’ greater cash income for wage employment and the renting of farmland. Gurung households are one of the main ethnic groups in the two-village community (199 households) : Gurungs comprise 30 per cent, Brahmins 31 per cent, Chettris 20 per cent and members of the Occupational Caste 19 per cent (formerly known as ‘untouchables’). In the introductory Part I of the thesis (Chapters 1 and 2) the existing problems of population growth and resource scarcity in central Nepal are examined, together with the historical reasons behind the existence of a hierarchical social structure coupled with the current marked disparities in access to resources and education. Part II (Chapters 3, 4 and 5) examines the recent changes in household economic strategies of different ethnic groups. There have been growing differences between ethnic groups in their access to different sources of income and in their resource utilization patterns. Moreover, economic interdependence between ethnic groups has also grown through the greater renting of land and the employment of wage labourers. These changes have helped some households, mainly Gurung, Brahmin and Chettri. Occupational Caste households (landless) who in earlier years were in effect attached labourers working for higher castes households^ have so far been sustained mainly by low-wage employment. Part III (Chapters 6 and 7) examines reasons for the continued plight of the disadvantaged poor, notably their lack of access to forest resources (nominally owned in common) and their worsening inequality, despite some of the Nepal government’s well intentioned programs. In the short term the bureaucracy and political establishment, with their roots in the long-existing social structure, have continued to help the wealthier and more influential ethnic groups to gain major advantages as national-level development proceeds. For the present at least, many low-paid and near-illiterate members of the Occupational Caste remain voluntary captives in their villages, but as rural development proceeds (helped by necessary improvements in education and training), the next stage in agrarian restructuring seems likely to see a stronger movement of the poor to take up urban-based, non-farm employment. Intensive fieldwork in the two-village study area was carried out in 1989-90, supplemented by fieldwork of a more general kind in Kaski District in 1993-94.