Agriculture, culture and rural occupations

In 2011, about 69 per cent of Indians lived in rural areas. In village life, land is the most important resource and the main form of property.

Agriculture is a way of life, not just an occupation. Many festivals celebrate the harvest and mark the farming year's new beginning: Pongal (Tamil Nadu), Bihu (Assam), Baisakhi (Punjab) and Ugadi (Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh).

But villages were never only farmers. They also had:

• artisans: potters, carpenters, weavers, blacksmiths and goldsmiths;
• specialists: priests, astrologers, story-tellers, musicians, barbers and washermen.

This occupational diversity was reflected in the service castes, each doing its traditional work for the village, often paid in grain at harvest.

Many of these crafts declined in colonial times, when cheap factory-made imports (cloth, metal goods) replaced them, pushing artisans into farm labour.

Today, many rural people earn from non-farm work:

• government services: teachers, postal workers, health workers (a post office job in a village is non-agricultural work);
• work in nearby factories or towns;
• the army, which has long recruited from villages in states like Punjab, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh;
• small businesses, transport and construction.

So the rural is not just agriculture: villages have always had many kinds of work, and today even more.