JAC Board Class 9th Social Science Notes Economics Chapter 1 The Story of Village Palampur
→ Introduction
- The story of village Palampur is a narrative story based on a research study by Gilbert Etiena of a village in Bulandshahar district (Uttar Pradesh).
- The purjpsse of the story of village Palampur, an imaginative village, is to introduce some basic concepts relating to production like-farming, small scale manufacturing, dairy, transport etc.
- These production activities need various types of resources such as; natural resources, man-made resources, man-power, money etc.
- Farming is the main activity in Palampur.
- Palampur is well-connected with neighbouring villages and towns. An all weather road and many kinds of transport are visible on this road like, bullock carts, motorcycles, jeeps, tractors and trucks etc.
- Palampur has about 450 families belonging to several different castes.
- The dalits comprise one-third of the population of the village. Their houses are made of mud and straw.
- Palampur has a fairly well-developed system of roads, transport, electricity, irrigation, school and health centre.
- In villages across India, farming is the main production activity. The other production
- activities are small-scale manufacturing, transport, shop-keeping etc.
→ Organisation of Production
- The aim of production is to produce the goods and services that we need.
- The factors of production are land, labour, physical capital and human capital.
- Land is the first requirement for produciton and the second is labour.
- Physical capital includes tools, machines, buildings, i.e., fixed capital and raw materials and money in hand, i.e., working capital.
- Knowledge and enterprise come under human capital. It is required to put together all the above inputs to produce the output.
→ Land is fixecT
- 75% per cent people of Palampur are dependent on farming for their livelihood.
- There has been no expansion in land area under cultivation in Palampur since 1960.
- The standard unit of measuring land is hectare, though in the villages it is measured in local units as bigha, guintha etc.
→ Ways to grow more from the same land
- In Palampur, all land is cultivated. No land is left idle.
- During the rainy season, farmers of Palampur grow jowar, bajra, potato, wheat and
sugarcane. - During the winter season, fields are sown with wheat. From the produced wheat, farmers keep enough wheat for their family’s consumption and sell the rest of the wheat in the market at Raiganj.
- A part of land is also devoted to sugarcane production, which is harvested once every year.
- Farmers in Palampur are able to grow three different crops in a year due to a well- developed system of irrigation.
- The first few tubewells were installed by the government in Palampur.
- Of the total cultivated area in the country, a little less than 40 per cent is irrigated even today. In the remaining area, farming is largely dependent on rainfall.
- To grow more than one crop on a piece of land during the year is called multiple cropping.
- Multiple cropping is the most common way of increasing production on a given piece of land.
- The Green Revolution in the late 1960s introduced the Indian farmer to cultivation of wheat and rice using high yielding varieties of seeds.
- Farmers of Punjab, Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh were the first to try out the
modern farming methods in India. . - In Palampur, with the use of HYV seeds, the yield of wheat went up to 3200 kg per hectare as compared to 1300 kg per hectare with the traditional seeds.
- Farmer now had greater amounts of surplus wheat to sell in the markets.
→ Sustenance of land
- Modern farming methods have overused the natural resources base.
- The Green Revolution is associated with the loss of soil fertility in many areas due to increased use of chemical fertilizers.
- Chemical fertilizers kill the bacteria and micro organisms on the soil and reduce its fertility.
- About one-third population of Palampur is landless while most of them are dalits.
→ Availability of labour
- Farming requires a great deal of hard work.
- Small farmers along with their families cultivate their own fields. Medium and large farmers hire farm labourers to work on their fields.
- Farm labourers come either from landless families or families cultivating small plots of land.
- These labourers can be paid in cash or in objects like crops; sometimes they get meals also.
- Wages vary widely from region to region, from crop to crop and from one farm activity toanotfe
- There is also a wide variation in the duration of employment.
→ Capital needed in farming.
- As modern farming methods require a great deal of capital, the farmer needs more money for it.
- Mostly, small farmers have to borrow money ffom large farmers or the village money lenders or traders to arrange modern farming methods.
- The rate of interest on such loans is»very high. They are put to great distress to repay the loan.
→ Sale of surplus farm products
- The large and medium farmers of Palampur retain a part of the produced grain for their own use and sell the surplus in the market.
- The farmers earn a good amount of money through this sale.
- They use this money to purchase inputs for the next farming season, purchase capital equipment or even give loans to small farmers.
→ Non-Farm Activities in Palampur
- Only 25 per cent of the people working in Palampur are engaged in activities other than agriculture.
- There is a variety of non-agricultural activities in the village, e.g., dairy farming, manufacturing activities, shop keeping, transportation, computer education, jaggery production, etc.
→ Manufacturing: It is the process of making products, or goods from raw materials by the use of manual labour or machinery.
→ Resources: Commodities or services used to produce goods and services.
→ Bogeys: A kind of transport made of wood and drawn by buffaloes.
→ Dalits: People belonging to lower castet are known as Dalits or SCs.
→ Irrigation: The artificial application of water to land to assist in the production of crops by tubewells, canals and tanks, etc. .
→ Kharif: The autumn crop sown at the begining of summer rains.
→ Rabi: The spring crop sown in winter.
→ Multiple Cropping: To grow more than one crop on a piece of land during the same year is known as multiple cropping.
→ Yield: An amount of crop produced in a given piece of land during a single season.
→ Green Revolution: It is a revolution in the field of agriculture in the late 1960s. It introduced the Indian farmers to the moden methods of farming to increase agricultural production.
→ HYV seeds: High yielding varities of seeds which promise to produce much greater amounts of grain than traditional seeds.
→ Chemical Fertilisers: It is a substance applied to soils or directly to plants to provide ^ nutrients, optimum for their growth and development.
→ Surplus: An amount of something left over when requirements have been met. It is an excess of production or supply.
→ Production activity: The creation of value or wealth by producing goodg and services,
→ Moneylender: A person who lends money which has to be paid back .at a high rate of interest.