Rural Non-Farm Employment in India

Abstract

The evidence of diversification of rural employment structure away from farm to non-farm activities has generated a lot of interest among researchers. The available literature on the subject, however, presents a mixed pattern of empirical evidence related to both prosperity-induced and distress- push factors in the growth of rural non-farm employment. It records also impact on rural non-farm employment, of various factors such as education and literacy, urbanisation, caste and gender. The present study takes into account the latest data available on the subject to review the nature of employment in the rural non-farm sector. It examnes the sectoral distribution of employment, employment status (whether self-employed or wage earners and the expected rewards, self-employed workers, employment distribution between organised and unorganised sectors and investigating the productivity levels of the latter which accommodated the most of the nonfarm employment.