Pauperisation of Indian Peasantry: A Peep into the Past

began during the British rule, has had devastating impact on the rural economy as recorded in our economic history. Villain of the piece was the village money lender. Though Manu, the Vedic lawgiver, had considered money-lending as a respectable vocation, over the years, money lender has undergone transformation as an exploiter. A Sanskrit saying, which defined the qualities of a good village worth living in, quoted by the Report of the Rural Credit Survey, has accorded importance to the presence of village money lender. According to it an ideal village is one, where there is a perennial river, a priest to administer to the soul, a vaidya to treat at times of sickness and a moneylender from to borrow at times of need. Perhaps, an ideal village of this description vanished over a century ago. The Royal Commission on Indian agriculture had declared in1927 that "The Indian farmer is born in debt, lives in debt and dies in debt". An irony of fate is that farmers in the Independent India are forced to commit suicide, even after all out efforts were made to institutionalize rural credit particularly during the last100 years. Besides the large number of primary cooperative credit societies, more than 35,364 rural branches of public sector banks and regional rural banks have entered the rural scene to replace village money lenders. The impact made by them is not very successful. Money lenders in India have a history much longer than that of the institutional credit agencies. These all pervading omni-present exploiters had mastered dubious methods of depriving the helpless farmers of their small landholdings. The exploited farmers in Maharashtra had revolted against them during the latter half of the 19th century. Deccan Riots, as it was called, in which violence erupted in 1875 in Poona and Ahmednagar districts against the greedy moneylenders. Their machination was indirectly supported by a lacuna in the legal system relating to the Law of Limitation. How blatantly this was used by money lenders, is graphically recorded in the Report of the Deccan Riot