(a) 'The transfer of land from cultivating to the non-cultivating owners is bringing about transformation in Indian society.'…

(a)

• The phenomenon: land is passing from those who till it to those who own without cultivating. These include absentee landlords, urban investors, real-estate developers, corporations, and farming households that have moved into non-farm work and lease out their land.

Illustrations and transformation:

• Peri-urban land markets: around Gurugram, Noida and Bengaluru, farmland has become real estate. Farmers turned into rentiers or were dispossessed, and their children took up insecure urban jobs. Michael Levien (Dispossession without Development, 2018) shows a Rajasthan SEZ village where land brokers prospered while many villagers lost livelihoods;
• Industrial and infrastructure acquisition: SEZs and corridors led to movements such as Singur (2006–08) and Nandigram (2007), and to the RFCTLARR Act, 2013, which requires consent and social impact assessment;
• Reverse and concealed tenancy: migrant or salaried owners lease land to poorer tenants, often informally, so the tiller lacks security and access to credit, insurance and relief;
• Remittance economies: in Kerala, Gulf money bought land as a status asset, and paddy fields were left fallow or converted;
• Agrarian class change: marginal peasants become wage labourers or migrants, while land concentrates among investors. Land becomes an asset, not a livelihood.

Social consequences:

• the decline of the jajmani and caste-based agrarian ties, and of the cultivator's social identity;
• new rentier and land-broker classes;
• agrarian and Adivasi protest movements;
• the feminisation of cultivation, as women farm land owned by absent men;
• a loss of food production and ecological change.

• Balance: in some regions land moved to cultivators through land reform (for example Kerala, West Bengal). The current trend is uneven across India.
• Conclusion: the statement is largely justified. Land's shift from use value to exchange value is transforming class, caste and gender relations in the countryside.

(b)

Factors:

• Historical: colonial de-industrialisation and the flood of machine-made goods ruined weaving and crafts;
• Competition: cheap factory and imported goods (plastics, synthetic textiles, aluminium utensils) displaced pottery, handloom and metalware;
• Technology and productivity: outdated tools, low productivity and no design innovation;
• Credit and raw materials: artisans depend on moneylenders and traders for loans, yarn, leather and clay, and middlemen take the margin;
• Markets: weak access to urban and online markets, and poor branding;
• Social change: the decline of jajmani ties, the stigma of caste-linked crafts (such as leather or pottery), and young people's move to education and urban jobs;
• Policy shifts:
• small-scale industry de-reservation (completed by 2015) and liberalisation exposed crafts to competition;
• compliance costs, such as GST, burden tiny units;
• support through the KVIC (1956) was patchy;
• Ecology: loss of common resources such as clay, forest produce and water.

• Revival efforts: PMEGP (2008), SFURTI (clusters, 2005), One District One Product, PM Vishwakarma (2023), GI tags, and e-commerce platforms. Their reach is limited.
• Conclusion: village industries declined through market, technological, social and policy forces working together. Revival needs credit, design, markets and collective organisation such as cooperatives.

(c)

Social bases of mobilisation:

• caste (Srinivas's "vote banks"; Rajni Kothari's Caste in Indian Politics, 1970);
• class (peasants, workers);
• religion, language and region, tribe, and more recently gender and welfare beneficiaries.

Change over 60–70 years:

• 1950s–60s: the "Congress system" (Kothari, 1964) was an umbrella coalition of upper-caste elites and dominant peasant castes, with Dalit and minority support mobilised through patronage and vertical ties;
• Regional and linguistic mobilisation: linguistic states (1956), the DMK victory in Tamil Nadu (1967) and the TDP in Andhra Pradesh (1983);
• Class and peasant mobilisation: Left movements in Kerala and West Bengal; farmers' movements (Charan Singh; the BKU in the 1980s);
• 1990s: Mandal brought OBC assertion (the SP and RJD), and Dalit parties rose (the BSP, founded 1984). Christophe Jaffrelot called this a "silent revolution", and Yogendra Yadav a "second democratic upsurge" of lower orders;
• Religious mobilisation: the Ayodhya movement and the rise of the BJP;
• Recent phase (2014 onward):
• cross-caste Hindu consolidation, with sub-categorisation of non-dominant OBCs and Dalits;
• women voting as an independent constituency, with turnout now equal to men's;
• a welfare-beneficiary (labharthi) constituency built through direct benefit transfers;
• digital campaigning.

• Continuity: caste and community remain central, but they are now combined with class, welfare, gender and aspiration.
• Conclusion: there has been substantial change, from vertical, patronage-based mobilisation to horizontal, identity- and interest-based mobilisation, and now to new cross-cutting coalitions.

(d)

Scale:

• Census 2011 counted about 45 crore internal migrants;
• the Economic Survey 2016–17 estimated about 9 million interstate migrants a year;
• most work in construction, brick kilns, factories, domestic work, hotels and street vending, and almost all are informal.

Problems:

• No contracts or social security: no provident fund, health cover or accident insurance. Wage theft and non-payment occur through layers of contractors (thekedars);
• Debt bondage: advance payments tie workers to brick kilns and sugarcane cutting, a form of neo-bondage (Jan Breman);
• Unsafe work and housing: occupational hazards on building sites and in factories; workers live on site or in slums without water, sanitation or tenure;
• Exclusion from welfare: ration cards, health schemes and schooling were tied to the home state. The 2020 COVID-19 lockdown stranded millions, and the Supreme Court (2021) ordered registration and rations;
• Social discrimination: language barriers, hostility and occasional violence against "outsiders", and exclusion from local politics, since many cannot vote where they work;
• Gender: women migrants face lower wages, harassment and a double burden;
• Family: children drop out of school or work at sites, and the elderly are left behind.

Responses:

• the Inter-State Migrant Workmen Act, 1979, now subsumed in the OSH Code, 2020 (in force from November 2025);
• One Nation One Ration Card and e-Shram registration;
• some state initiatives, such as Kerala's migrant health insurance and housing.

• Conclusion: migrants are essential but invisible. They are rarely treated as full citizens where they work. Portable rights, registration, housing and enforcement of labour law are needed.

(e)

The law:

• Article 24 prohibits employing children under 14 in factories, mines and hazardous work; Article 21A and the RTE Act, 2009 guarantee schooling for ages 6–14; Article 39(e) and (f) protect children;
• the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986 was amended in 2016: it bans all employment of children under 14 and hazardous work for adolescents aged 14–18;
• M.C. Mehta v State of Tamil Nadu (1996) ordered a rehabilitation welfare fund;
• enforcement tools include the PENCIL portal (2017) and rescue operations.

Where law has helped:

• the number of child workers aged 5–14 fell from about 1.26 crore (2001) to about 1.01 crore (2011), according to the Census;
• school enrolment has become near-universal;
• campaigns such as Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Kailash Satyarthi, Nobel Peace Prize 2014) have rescued children and raised awareness;
• child labour in export industries such as carpets fell under legal and consumer pressure.

Where it has failed:

• the 2016 family enterprise exception allows children to work at home after school, which is where most child labour is: bidi, bangles, embroidery and farm work;
• weak enforcement: few inspections and very few convictions;
• poverty, debt and migration push children into work, and COVID-19 school closures increased it;
• hidden forms such as domestic work, trafficking and informal supply chains escape the law;
• social acceptance of children's work as "training" persists.

• Comment: law has reduced but not abolished child labour. Abolition requires universal quality schooling, decent adult wages, social protection, and action against poverty and caste disadvantage alongside enforcement.