The literature on agrarian change in India collapses women’s class relations into those of male household heads. Sirisha Naidu and Smriti Rao examine how the 2019 Indian Time Use survey could lend itself to better understand class relations by accommodating an expanded conception of work as including reproductive labor; accounting for the diversified livelihoods of rural Indians; and more accurately grasping caste and gender distinctions in differentiated labor processes with capital. Within this framework, Naidu and Rao explore methods for deepening feminist political economy analyses of agrarian change.

Since liberalization, urban migration in India has increased in quantity, but also changed in quality, with permanent marriage migration and temporary, circular employment migration rising, even as permanent economic migration remains stagnant. In this new paper, Smriti  Rao and Vamsi Vakulabharanam understand internal migration in India to be a re-ordering of productive and reproductive labor that signifies a deep transformation of society. This transformation is a response to the combination of agrarian, employment, and social reproduction crises.  The migration patterns support capital accumulation, but create major burdens for a majority of Indians, who are seeking stable, rooted livelihoods.