RURAL INDEBTEDNESS IN INDIA: DIMENSIONS, CAUSES, AND PERCEPTIONS
Public Deposited- Creator
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Kandikuppa, Sandeep
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Curriculum in Environment and Ecology
- Abstract
- Debt is omnipresent. Almost everybody borrows at some point or another. Yet, the pressure to repay exacts a higher toll—financially and mentally—on some than on others. Rural households in India have found their debt burdens to be onerous and have been agitating for ‘relief from debt’. Scholars and policymakers have studied indebtedness in India for almost a hundred years. Yet, the vast body of work suffers from three shortcomings. First, it does not lay out the precise dimensions of indebtedness, and often conflates ‘rural indebtedness’ with ‘farmers’ indebtedness’. In the process, it fails to acknowledge the diversities within the category of ‘farmers.’ Second, extant literature does not consider the impacts of climate change on household debt burden. Third, it does not adequately grapple with the moral underpinnings of debt. In my first substantive chapter, titled ‘Class and vulnerability to debt in rural India-a statistical overview’, I undertake a class analysis to ask: how indebted are rural households and do the magnitude and nature of indebtedness vary across space, time, and classes? In the second chapter titled ‘Climate change and household debt in rural India’, I ask: what is the impact of shifts in rainfall, temperature, and occurrence of extreme events like droughts and floods, on household debt burdens? In both these chapters I rely on large secondary datasets like the National Sample Survey Office’s All-India Debt and Investment Survey, the Indian Human Development Survey, and the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA-2) to propel my arguments. In the third chapter, I use qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews with farmers in Andhra Pradesh to delineate the moral economy of debt and identify the political and economic factors that shape how these rural households ‘live with their debt’.
- Date of publication
- 2021
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
- Advisor
- Gray, Clark
- Havice, Elizabeth
- Pearce, Lisa
- Jagger, Pamela
- Krishna, Anirudh
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
- Graduation year
- 2021
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