essay on development of villages

My Village Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on my village.

My Village Essay- My village is a place that I like to visit in my holidays or whenever I feel tired and want to relax. A village is a place that is far away from the pollution and noise of the city. Also, you feel a connection with the soil in a village.

Moreover, there are trees, a variety of crops , diversity of flowers, and rivers, etc. Besides all this, you feel the cold breeze at night and a warm but pleasant breeze in the day.

The Facts About the Village

Around more than 70% of India’s population resides in villages. Likewise, villages are the main source of food and agricultural produce that we consume. After independence, the villages have grown much in both populations as well as education .

Village peoples are more dedicated to their work then the people of the city also they have more strength and capacity then urban area people.

Moreover, the entire village lives in peace and harmony and there is no conflict of any kind. Villagers come forward in each other sorrows and happiness and they are of helpful nature.

Most importantly, you can see stars at night which you no longer see in the city.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Description of My Village

My village exists in a low lying area that has a warm summer and a chilly winter. Mostly I visit my village in summers because of the holidays. Although the village is far cooler than the city during the summer. Also, you do not need air conditioners in a village because of the breeze. In a village you see greenery and almost every household has a minimum of one tree in their courtyards.

In addition, the thing that I like the most about my village is the fresh and revitalizing air. The air gives a feeling of refreshment even if I have slept for 4-5 hours. Most importantly, at night I see and count stars which I can’t do in the city.

Importance of Village

Villages existed in India from ancient times and they have been dependent on each other for the demand and supply of goods. Likewise, they contribute a lot to the growth and development of the country. India is a country who depends on agriculture more than its secondary and tertiary sector.

Also, India is the second most populated nation of the world and to feed this big population they need food which comes from the villages. This describes why they are important to us and everybody.

In conclusion, we can say that villages are the backbone of the economy. Also, my village is a part of all the villages in India where people still live in peace and harmony . Besides, the people of the villages are friendly and lives a happy and prosperous life as compared to the people of urban areas.

FAQs about My Village

Q.1 What is the best thing about the villages? A.1 There are many good things about villages such as fresh air, rivers, trees, no pollution, the earthy smell, fresh and organic food, and many more great things.

Q.2 Do villages lack in development? A.2 No, villages have developed quite well also they are developing at a pace faster than the cities.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

Essay on Indian Villages

Students are often asked to write an essay on Indian Villages in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Indian Villages

Introduction.

Indian villages represent the true essence of India. They are the places where the heart of our nation beats. These villages are rich in tradition, culture, and simplicity.

Life in Villages

Life in Indian villages is serene and peaceful. People live in harmony with nature. They wake up early, work in the fields, and lead a simple life.

The economy of Indian villages is primarily based on agriculture. Farmers work hard to grow crops which feed not only their village but also the cities.

Despite challenges, Indian villages are the backbone of our country. They embody the spirit of unity, hard work, and simplicity.

250 Words Essay on Indian Villages

The essence of india.

India’s soul resides in its villages, which are home to about 70% of the country’s population. These villages encapsulate the quintessential Indian culture and traditions, offering a stark contrast to the country’s bustling urban landscapes.

Rich Cultural Tapestry

Each Indian village is a microcosm of India’s rich cultural tapestry. The local festivals, art forms, music, and dance reflect the diverse heritage of the country. Villagers live in close-knit communities, exhibiting a strong sense of unity and mutual support. The age-old customs and traditions are passed down generations, keeping the cultural legacy alive.

Economic Backbone

Agriculture, the primary occupation in Indian villages, forms the backbone of India’s economy. Farmers work tirelessly, contributing significantly to the country’s food security and raw material production for various industries. Additionally, rural India is a hub for cottage industries, producing handicrafts, textiles, pottery, and other goods, promoting the country’s economic diversity.

Challenges and Opportunities

Despite their cultural richness and economic contribution, Indian villages face numerous challenges. Lack of infrastructure, inadequate healthcare, and limited educational facilities are significant issues. However, these challenges present opportunities for growth. Initiatives like rural electrification, digital connectivity, and skill development programs can transform these hamlets into engines of growth.

Indian villages are a testament to the country’s resilience, cultural richness, and economic strength. While they face challenges, the potential for development and growth is immense. By addressing these issues, India can unlock the true potential of its villages, propelling the nation towards comprehensive and inclusive growth.

500 Words Essay on Indian Villages

India, often referred to as the ‘land of villages,’ is a country where the heart of its culture, traditions, and rich heritage resides in its rural areas. Indian villages are a mirror to the diverse, vibrant, and colorful ethos of the country, reflecting the real essence of India.

The Simplicity and Authenticity

Indian villages are characterized by their simplicity and authenticity. The lifestyle in these areas is uncomplicated, with people living in harmony with nature. The villagers are primarily engaged in agricultural activities, which form the backbone of the Indian economy. They follow a simple routine, starting their day at the break of dawn, tilling their fields, feeding their cattle, and ending with a peaceful sleep under the starlit sky.

The Socio-Cultural Fabric

The socio-cultural fabric of Indian villages is rich and diverse. Each village has a unique identity, marked by its local festivals, folk dances, music, and art forms. The ‘Panchayat’ system, a traditional form of local self-government, plays a vital role in decision-making and conflict resolution within the village. Despite the diversity, there is unity, mutual cooperation, and a strong sense of community among the villagers.

Economic Aspects

On the economic front, Indian villages are predominantly agrarian, with agriculture and allied activities being the primary source of livelihood. However, in recent years, there is a growing shift towards non-farm activities, including handicrafts, small-scale industries, and services. This diversification has the potential to enhance rural incomes and reduce agrarian distress.

Despite their charm, Indian villages face numerous challenges. Lack of basic amenities like clean drinking water, sanitation, healthcare, and quality education are some of the pressing issues. Poverty, unemployment, and social evils like casteism and gender inequality further exacerbate the situation.

However, these challenges also present opportunities for development. Initiatives like the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) for rural connectivity, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan for sanitation, and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan for education are transforming the rural landscape. Digital technology and internet connectivity have opened new avenues for rural entrepreneurship and e-governance.

In conclusion, Indian villages are the soul of the country, embodying its cultural richness and diversity. While they are grappling with several challenges, the winds of change are blowing. With targeted interventions and the right impetus, these villages can become the hub of sustainable and inclusive development, truly representing the idea of ‘Gram Swaraj’ or self-sufficient villages envisaged by Mahatma Gandhi. The future of India lies in the strength of its villages, and it is imperative to empower them to unlock their full potential.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Indian Judiciary System
• Essay on Indian Freedom Fighters
• Essay on Indian Family Values

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today

Meet top uk universities from the comfort of your home, here’s your new year gift, one app for all your, study abroad needs, start your journey, track your progress, grow with the community and so much more.

Verification Code

An OTP has been sent to your registered mobile no. Please verify

Thanks for your comment !

Our team will review it before it's shown to our readers.

• School Education /

✍️Essay on Village Life: Samples in 150, 250 Words

• Updated on  
• Nov 7, 2023

Essay on village life: In an era of technological advancement, village life offers you a much better lifestyle than any other place. People living in the countryside lead a simple life because they are more involved in activities like farming , pasture grazing, etc. The chirping of birds, mud houses, huts, fields, fresh air, etc is the reflection of village life. The simplicity in the environment of the village provides a welcoming environment .

People living in the village live in peace and harmony with each other. The real beauty or the origin of a city can be briefed through the environment of the village. Apart from all these, village life is much more economical as compared to urban life . This blog will provide sample essay on village life for students and children, you can refer to these essays for exams or essay writing competitions!

Table of Contents

• 1 Short Essay on Village Life
• 2 Essay on Village Life in 150 Words
• 3 Life in a Village 250 Words

📌 Also Read: Essay on Gaganyaan

Short Essay on Village Life

Village life is a reflection of interdependency between the different communities. You can witness pure love and brotherhood among people. People living in rural areas are simple and lead a life following the traditional method of living without any modern amenities. The other side to its beauty is its difficulty. 

Villages are devoid of the comfort and facilities that are available in urban society. There is no source of entertainment and people need to arrange things on their own. Facilities like proper sewage areas, toilets, electricity, etc are also not available in villages. In spite of all such difficulties, people adjust to live a peaceful life in villages.

📌 Also Read: Student Accommodation in Corporation Villages

Essay on Village Life in 150 Words

With an increasing number of people in the world, pollution is also increasing. But you can lead a pollution-free life in the village. India is known for its rural life because the majority of the people are dependent on agriculture for their livelihood.

People lead a very simple life in villages. The roles of men and women are well-defined there. Women are the homemakers and look after the household activities, whereas men in the village go out and do harvesting, sowing, and other agricultural activities to earn for the family.

Though their life is simple there are various difficulties like lack of amenities, electricity, water supply, nursing house, etc.

Authentic Indian culture can be witnessed through the lifestyle led by the villagers. One thing which is a major concern for village life is the lack of education.

Education is a basic human right and every individual in the country must get an education . The Government of India must take some steps and draft some policies to impart high-quality education to the people living in villages for the further development of the rural sector. 

📌 Also Read: Speech on Corruption

Life in a Village 250 Words

Village life is the most beautiful representation of hard work. It is considered as the backbone of the Nation. Villagers, especially farmers give their sweat and blood for the agricultural produce to satisfy the domestic as well as international consumers. Despite all this, the villagers had to face many challenges as they were deprived of the technological advancements as well as the facilities available in the urban area.

If we compare village life vs. city life, the lack of amenities, technological advancements, and industrial inference in the villages tend to create a fresh and pollution-free environment. On the other hand city life is very polluted owing to industrialization , urbanization, and heavy population.

People in the village lead a healthy, peaceful, and happy life. If the government introduced some policies and raised funds for the development of the rural sector and provided them with some basic amenities like hospitals, nursing homes, proper sanitation systems, sewage systems, schools, electricity, etc. then the village life would be much more comfortable. 

Talking about safety, the crime rates are lower in villages as compared to cities. Most of the people living in cities take some days off to spend their holidays in villages so that they can live in peace away from the chaos of city life. The honking of cars, pollution, traffic, work stress, etc is very stressful to deal with whereas in village life things are more simple and sorted because there is no chaos and people share a bond of brotherhood. 

The major section in India is dependent on agriculture for livelihood so they live in villages. Agriculture is a tough job and living in villages is also quite a challenge but people in villages lead a peaceful and simple life.

Village life is simple and economical. Owing to less industrial pollution in villages, the village environment is full of fresh air to breathe. Children can play freely and people share the feeling of brotherhood neglecting the religious boundaries.

Away from the chaos of city lights and traffic, village life is just the opposite. It is calm and free of noise and pollution. People in the village lead a simple life and are mainly involved in the agriculture sector.

A village is a type of settlement for people in a rural area. Villages are smaller than cities. People in villages generally perform agricultural tasks and take care of the livestock. A maximum of 2500 inhabitants live in a village. People belonging to different religions, caste, or creed live here peacefully.

📌 Relevant Blogs

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu .

Kajal Thareja

Hi, I am Kajal, a pharmacy graduate, currently pursuing management and is an experienced content writer. I have 2-years of writing experience in Ed-tech (digital marketing) company. I am passionate towards writing blogs and am on the path of discovering true potential professionally in the field of content marketing. I am engaged in writing creative content for students which is simple yet creative and engaging and leaves an impact on the reader's mind.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Contact no. *

Connect With Us

25,000+ students realised their study abroad dream with us. Take the first step today.

Resend OTP in

Need help with?

Study abroad.

UK, Canada, US & More

IELTS, GRE, GMAT & More

Scholarship, Loans & Forex

Country Preference

New Zealand

Which English test are you planning to take?

Which academic test are you planning to take.

Not Sure yet

When are you planning to take the exam?

Already booked my exam slot

Within 2 Months

Want to learn about the test

Which Degree do you wish to pursue?

When do you want to start studying abroad.

January 2024

September 2024

What is your budget to study abroad?

How would you describe this article ?

Please rate this article

We would like to hear more.

Have something on your mind?

Make your study abroad dream a reality in January 2022 with

India's Biggest Virtual University Fair

Essex Direct Admission Day

Why attend .

Don't Miss Out

Village Communities and Global Development

To get a broader perspective on the decade ahead, it can be helpful to reconsider the long trends in history that led us to where we are now. This essay offers a review of historical development to show the vital role of communities and local government in the foundations of the modern global institutions on which future prosperity will depend.

A 2016 World Bank policy report entitled Making Politics Work for Development observes that “not only are local governments the last mile of [public] service delivery, which national leaders might want to improve, but they are also the ‘first mile’ at which citizens determine the platforms on which leaders are selected and sanctioned.” That is, local government can be vital for economic development in two

different ways. First, local government is responsible for providing local public goods and services that are essential for a prosperous community. But second, local government can be a basic point of entry into the political system.

The significance of this latter point should be evident to economists who understand that lower entry barriers can improve performance in any competitive system. Local leaders who provide good public service in local government can be recognized as strong qualified candidates for higher offices, and so democratic local government can increase competitive incentives for better public service at all levels of government. Successful democratic development in a nation depends on an ample supply of leaders with good reputations for managing public resources responsibly in public service. (This supply could be called public political capital.) Autonomous institutions of local government can be a primary source of such trusted leadership.

Thus, I would argue, development economics is incomplete when comparative local politics is ignored. Theories of economic development should be based on a general understanding of how communities have been organized in traditional societies. For such a foundation, this paper draws from some deeply insightful observations about traditional autonomous villages and feudal manors by Henry Sumner Maine, a nineteenth-century British jurist who studied the history of Western law and problems of law in India under British rule. From this perspective, I want to argue that local leadership has had a vital role at every stage of global development in the long history of humanity. But before turning to Maine’s observations, let me start with a broad theoretical and historical overview.

Local Community Leadership and Global Development

We may interpret the folk theorem of repeated games as a fundamental model of how people who live together in a small community can discipline themselves to maintain virtually any pattern of behavior that may be adaptive for their survival. The folk theorem is proven by strategies in which anyone who deviated from his or her prescribed proper behavior would then suffer an adverse change of status in the community and so would be treated worse by others in the community thereafter. I would conjecture that some aspects of such strategies might be hard-wired in our human brains, such as an inclination to judge the propriety of the behavior of others in our community, and a reciprocal fear of losing status in their eyes.

In particular, trusted public leadership depends on a reputational equilibrium where an individual expects that the community will recognize him as a leader and will accord him special powers and benefits of this high status as long as he uses these powers properly to provide certain public goods or services. If he acts otherwise then he could lose this privileged status. To motivate proper leadership, it must entail expected rewards which are not less than the benefits (or moral-hazard rents) that the leader could get by abusing the powers of his position. Successful societies must be able to get people focused on such equilibria with some generally accepted leaders, who can take responsibility for essential public goods that require coordination or management by one person.

Such problems had to be solved among hunter-gatherer bands when our species first spread out of Africa to transform the world about 100,000 years ago. We may conjecture that some of the first uses of human language were for a band’s leader to assign roles in a hunt or battle and then to distribute shares of any rewards from success, but also for others in the band to gossip about whether their leader had exercised his coordinating power appropriately.

Then from about 10,000 years ago, the great transformative development of agriculture depended not just on some basic understanding of plants, but, as Douglass North wrote in 1981, also on the ability of people in farming communities to defend their rights to benefit from the crops that they had worked to plant and cultivate. Before the rise of states that could provide law and order over extensive regions, each village must have had the necessary leadership to fight for the defense of its territory against its neighbors, and to negotiate agreements and alliances with them. (Here it may be useful to note that, as Bernard Chapais argued in Primeval Kinship (2008), marriages have helped to form bonds of kinship between neighboring communities. So people could have membership both in a clan and a community, neither one of which necessarily subsumed the other. But the local community would necessarily have primary responsibility for defining and sustaining property rights in the territory that it occupied.)

Pre-modern states were typically established by an elite group who specialized in fighting and collecting tribute. The development of writing about 4,000 years ago was essential for these proto state-builders, so that they could maintain networks of trust among themselves even when they dispersed to supervise the village-communities under their protection.

Now the latest global transformation—modern economic development—has been catalyzed by the discovery of an amazingly high long-run elasticity of national output with respect to political reforms that extend legal and political rights broadly throughout the population. Here I might add that this elasticity was probably much smaller before modern advances in public health—which depended on scientific understanding of microbes—enabled more of the population to be concentrated in large cities and metropolitan areas. And the representative governments that enabled broad popular political participation in geographically extensive nations depended on nineteenth-century improvements in transportation and communication technology that allowed representatives of remote communities to commute regularly between their constituents and the national capital, as David Stasavage wrote in States of Credit (2011). By such technological advances and political reforms, people have been empowered to demand better public services and so have been encouraged to make greater private investments.

A change in the relationship between local and national politics has been integral to this transformation. In successful modern states, national leaders are regularly accountable to the general population, voting in their communities, and trusted local leaders can regularly rise into national politics. But traditional states generally depended on an exclusive national nobility, who as a class had responsibility for supporting and maintaining the state, and so the state’s protection of property rights was designed largely for the benefit of this national political elite. As a guide to the local institutional structures of such traditional systems, between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, let us turn now to the writings of Henry Sumner Maine.

Traditional Village Law

Henry Sumner Maine was a great British scholar of the history of law who in 1861 published a successful book entitled Ancient Law. Then he went to India to serve as a senior legal advisor to the British imperial government, where he studied legal problems from traditional Indian communities with a sensitivity that was rooted in his long study of the laws of ancient Rome and medieval Europe. On his return to England, he gave a series of lectures to describe a conceptual framework which he found to fit both European history and contemporary Indian developments. This remarkable synthesis was published in 1871 as Village-Communities in the East and West.

Maine did not try to rule out the possibility that some similarities between villages in colonial India and in pre-feudal Europe might be derived from ancient Indo-European traditions that both groups shared across thousands of years. But clearly the broad similarities that Maine found in traditional village-communities of East and West must be understood as elements of a stable adaptive strategy for a farming community to sustain itself without protection from a greater regional government.

The major organizational features that nineteenth-century Indian villages shared with medieval Teutonic villages were summarized by Maine as follows: the territory of the community would be divided into the cultivated area, and the areas of common fields or waste, and the residential area of the village. The cultivated land would be divided among the village households, but they had to cultivate their plots in a coordinated manner according to village rules, while the fields and waste areas were used in common by the whole village. In the village, each household was ruled by the recognized head of the family. Common economic transactions among the villagers were expected to be at customary prices. Disputes among the households would be resolved according to customary rules as defined by a village council or assembly. When its peaceful order was disturbed, the village would rely on the head of one preeminent family for leadership.

Here it is important to add that Maine saw economists’ concept of market price as a modern development, depending implicitly on an assumption that people have a right to trade with whoever offers the best price. But when property rights exist only as defined by the community, we should not expect a traditional village-community to support such an economic right. Then if a villager refused to trade with his neighbors at the customary price when outsiders offered better terms, he would weaken his relationships in the community on which all his rights ultimately depend. The option to buy from him at a low customary price helps to give other villagers a stake in his property.

In his first book, Ancient Law, Maine had observed that, before the growth of the Roman state, the laws of Rome were applied not to individuals, but to families; and each family was ruled by a pater familias who held despotic power over everyone else in the household. Relationships were regulated by people’s generally recognized status, not by bilateral contracts. In Village-Communities in the East and West, Maine saw that these communitarian principles were general characteristics of traditional villages in both ancient Europe and his contemporary India.

Economists generally see advantages in assuming that any individual can own property. But we should recognize that, in regions where no government exercises effective control, the property rights to land that are essential for agricultural development may not be enforceable without support from an entire community. Thus, before the establishment of an effective state, we should not be surprised to find communal property rights to be the norm in traditional autonomous villages. An individual might find it difficult to enforce a claim to valuable property alone, that is, without the support of other family members who share an interest in the claim. And a poor village, which could hardly afford to offer public adjudication for arbitrary contracts, might naturally limit its civil protection to the rights of social status recognized by the community.

Maine on Feudalization

Maine devoted one of his six 1871 lectures to feudalization, that is, to the transition of autonomous villages into feudal manors. He was deeply familiar with the feudal system as it had developed in medieval England, because its legacy still provided some of the basic principles in English land law. From this historical perspective, Maine found it remarkable to witness a process of feudal state-building in regions of colonial India in his own time.

When traditional autonomous villages come under the regional power of a sovereign state, they can gain some degree of peace from anarchic local warfare, but in exchange they must sacrifice some autonomy and submit to taxation by the state. Maine observed that, when a new province is annexed to a state, the first act of government must be to determine how much of the product from the land will be demanded by the sovereign state to defray its expenses. The result will inevitably be a redistribution of power in traditional villages, as the state must delegate some of its power to those who will serve its interests there. In particular, the problems of taxing remote villages may induce a state with limited administrative capability to concentrate local power in the hands of a few individuals who can take responsibility for keeping order and collecting taxes for the state.

Feudalism is the simplest way to integrate village-communities into a larger state system. The territory of the village-community becomes the manor of a feudal lord. The common lands become the lord’s private domain, but village households become tenants who retain customary rights in the community’s cultivated areas. The village council becomes the lord’s court, with the lord as judge and with villagers as jurors.

In the process of medieval feudalization, many manor lordships were derived from grants by monarchs, which were granted in exchange for service to the crown. But Maine noted that local lordships could also be defined by the state’s recognizing and elevating the position of an indigenous chief of a leading local family. Indeed, the distinction between a feudal manor and an autonomous village must be blurred by a recognition that autonomous village-communities regularly look to the head of one prominent family for leadership in any military action to defend the village. We should understand that a military operation requires a leader who can command people to perform dangerous actions in battle, and who can be expected thereafter to distribute appropriate rewards for good service. Such leadership inevitably must be associated with some privileges of power or moral-hazard rents for the leader.

Here it may be worth recalling a story from the thirteenth-century Secret History of the Mongols: a man asked a group of people if they had seen his odd-looking brother (who was a distant ancestor of Genghis Khan), and they told the man where his brother could be found. When the brothers met, they noted that the group seemed to be a remarkably egalitarian community, with no distinction between high and low; and so the brothers concluded that this group should be very easy to rob. The connection between inequality and defense is clarified later in this book, when a young Genghis Khan himself was robbed and then appealed to his overlord, who called together a great army that wreaked revenge on the robbers and their people. Thus, each vassal could be protected by his lord’s ability to command all the other vassals to serve in their mutual defense, and the lord would be motivated to fulfill this coordinating role because his reputation for leadership earns him high status and privileges of power. The point here is that some form of privileged leadership may be necessary to maintain an effective mechanism for protection of property rights over an extensive region.

Maine recognized that even when feudal lordship is bestowed on the traditional war-leader or chief of a formerly autonomous community, there may be substantial historical injustice in the conversion of communal property into private property of the lord. Most importantly, the state’s recognition of the indigenous chief makes him a local lord whose position no longer depends on the community’s approval of his public service. He is no longer accountable to the community.

Although the conversion of an autonomous village into a feudal manor was generally directed by the interests of the larger state, Maine urged his readers to recognize some important local benefits of this transformation. First, an autocratic manor may be able to adopt new agricultural techniques more readily than a village where the plans for cultivation each year require broad consensus among many households. Second, although traditional autonomous villages are often described as democratic, Maine argued that they should actually be considered little oligarchies, and the element of oligarchic inequality in such villages actually tends to worsen when a state provides even minimally good regional government.

To understand this effect, we must remember that local hardships have always driven some people to leave their homes and move to other communities, whether as refugees or migrants or indentured servants. Such immigrants arrive in a village with no claim to its land and resources, but they may earn a livelihood by the labor that they can provide. If nothing compels the old village families to share the privileges of their status with newcomers, then the descendants of such immigration will eventually form a permanent landless underclass in the village. But in the primordial chaos before the establishment of a state, a village-community would regularly face existential threats of war from invaders or from neighboring villages, and such crises could motivate villagers to offer full citizenship to all residents who fought for their community. This force for inclusion is eliminated when a state protects the village in a regional peace.

Thus, if a state provides even tolerably good government while permitting traditional villages to autonomously define their own citizenship, then their local democracy can develop into an oligarchy that has all the problems of collective ownership without avoiding the problems of class inequality.

Broadening the Distribution of Rights

Of course, feudalism is not the only way to integrate village-communities into a larger state. A state with weak ability to record and enforce property rights might have difficulty with the more complex alternatives, such as registering village land under the corporate ownership of a large (but not all-inclusive) group of local households, or subdividing the land and recording the portions claimed by each household. So we can understand why weak states throughout history would opt for the simple alternative of designating individual lords for remote village-communities, thus creating a class of powerful local leaders who share a strong interest in maintaining the state. But states with a large corps of literate administrators have been able to distribute rights of ownership and responsibility for taxation more widely in the population.

In the British administration of nineteenth-century India, Maine heard from partisans of different state-building strategies. Some argued for concentrating land ownership in a native aristocracy, but others argued for recognizing peasants as the owners of the land, with responsibility for taxes distributed either to individuals or to organized village groups. That is, instead of creating a lord (zamindar) for each village, the state could give the responsibility for land taxes to the village council, or the state could collect taxes directly from individuals based on their registered property rights. Comparing the regions of India where each system was used, Maine noted that the greatest prosperity could be found in the southern provinces where the government directly recognized the individual cultivators of the soil as owners and tax-payers.

Similar conclusions were found by Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer in a 2005 paper published in the American Economic Review. More than 130 years after Maine—and more than 50 years after the end of British rule—they still found evidence of lower agricultural productivity and higher infant mortality in areas where the British government had relied on local lords or zamindars. Feudalism may be the simplest strategy for establishing stable political control over a wide region, but it can have serious long-term economic costs. Much of global poverty today may be a legacy of such feudal strategies of traditional and colonial state-building.

Maine’s prior book, Ancient Law, focused on the transition of Rome from a traditional village-community to the center of a great state. Maine noted that, as the Roman state grew in power, there was a gradual development from collective ownership by families to ownership by individuals, and from rights defined by status in the community to rights defined by contracts. Economists understand the costs of free-rider moral-hazard problems that can be created by collective ownership. On the other hand, we can also understand that individual ownership may become feasible only when a state’s power to maintain order makes it realistic to expect that property rights can enforced without a large group sharing an intrinsic stake in these rights.

Maine also found that, in the history of Roman law, the state itself introduced the earliest demand for individual property rights. Property acquired by an individual in military service to the state was the first kind of property that a Roman was allowed to own as an individual, not subject to the head of his family. When the expanding Roman state needed an individual’s service, he gained the right to enjoy rewards from the state without interference from his father.

At the end of his book on Village-Communities, Maine noted one case of communities that were established with a traditional system of collective ownership but made a transition to individual ownership within a single generation: in the seventeenth-century settlement of New England. Defense against the native tribes there initially required collective ownership. But as the frontier became secure, small farmers could feel confident of state protection for their individual property rights, because their locally elected representatives directed the government of the province. In fact, as Mary Lou Lustig pointed out in a 2002 book, a scandal where commissioners demanded bribes to re-confirm settlers’ land claims occurred notably in a period when a British governor had suspended the representative assembly.

Above Local Politics

States have been organized by groups of people with specialized administrative and military skills, whose ability to achieve coordinated action depends on a dense network of relationships of trust and leadership which bind them together like an elite village. In the simplest possible model, the founders of a state could be a band of captains with a leader whose power depends on a reputation among them for reliably rewarding their service.. But the networks of trust within the state might not reach down into the local communities that are governed by the state, when leaders of the state are not locally accountable.

In much of history, when village-communities have been incorporated into a state by an invading force, the group that organized the state may have had little or no prior connection with the communities on which their rule would be imposed. This was certainly true in colonial governments that were created by foreigners. In such cases, we should not be surprised to find a basic problem of building trust between local villagers and the government of the wider state in which they live. In his 1976 book, The Remembered Village, M. N. Srinivas tells of villages in colonial India where the arrival of a district magistrate would cause villagers to hide, fearing that official attention to them would be for conscription, taxation, or punishment; and so the village headman might be left alone to welcome the magistrate.

Even in post-colonial Africa, Louise Fortmann’s 1983 report to the government of Botswana entitled The Role of Local Institutions in Rural Development found a serious disconnection between the government and the locally trusted leadership of traditional village institutions: “it is probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that those leaders who truly have followers, the traditional leaders, have weak links to the Government, and those with strong links (councillors, MPs) have few followers.” Fortmann observed that the government usually responded poorly to village development initiatives because nobody in the government was actually accountable to the villagers. She argued that villagers in rural Botswana had the skills and organizational capacity for local institutions to assume a major role in self-sustaining development, but only if the government would let these local institutions exercise some real power to raise revenue, incur expenses, and enforce decisions.

In general, Africans under colonial rule would have had direct contact with the bureaucratic national agencies of imperialist governments but not with the decentralized sub-national levels of domestic politics on which these imperialist governments were based. So it is not surprising that, after independence, post-colonial political elites in Africa might have viewed centralized national bureaucracy as a more “modern” way to integrate national power than the traditional institutions of local politics which were dominated by traditional chiefs.

In fact, however, traditional local institutions had vital roles in the historical process of building the strongest modern states of Europe and America. Since the fourteenth century, the institution of Parliament gave local leaders from the towns and counties of England an influential voice in national politics. The United States was established in 1776 by thirteen provincial assemblies, each consisting of local representatives who were elected by their communities. We should understand that the national governments of Britain and America achieved unprecedented wealth and power because their political systems were constitutionally designed to share power with the local leaders of communities throughout the nation, and their national leaders could exercise power only with support from locally elected representatives.

Development Economics and Comparative Local Politics

The point of this essay is to argue that local bands and village communities have been able to generate the trusted leadership that they needed since prehistoric antiquity, as local leadership was essential for humanity’s ability to transform the world, first in the hunter-gatherer bands which spread out of paleolithic Africa, and then in the farming communities which diffused from the Neolithic Middle East. Then, in more recent historical millennia, the growth of wider states has reduced the autonomy of village-communities, so that local authority could depend more on the external rulings of state officials and less on the internal accountability to the community.

But in less developed countries where state capacity is weak, we should expect that local community leadership would still have some importance in people’s lives. Thus, when the question is how to find responsible leadership to improve the provision of essential public goods and services for a whole nation, we should not ignore the supply of leadership that is available locally.

Local governments in poor communities might not have the most modern administrative technology, and the potential constituency of some local politicians might be limited by their identification with one side of an ethnic rivalry. Local politics might not be democratic (although multi-party democracy at the national level can help to strengthen local democratic competition, as national political parties can support alternatives to established local bosses when they lose popular support). But economic development depends on political leadership, and trusted leaders can be found in local politics. The great successes of modern economic growth began in nations where local leadership was regularly integrated into national politics.

From this perspective, we may consider Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Programme (NSP) to be a particularly well-designed development project. Under the NSP, a village could get up to $60,000 for development assistance, after the villagers met to select a public improvement project and to elect a village development commission (VDC) which would take responsibility for managing the project with the NSP funds. The elected leaders in the VDC would get full responsibility for the project, but NSP administrators ensured that the VDC spent its funds with clear public accounting to the people of the village. A careful study of the NSP published by the World Bank in 2013 has found it to be an effective way to help poor communities make public investments for better access to drinking water and electricity. The program may also have had some impact on local politics, as villagers were more likely to express critical discontent with the performance of their traditional village headman after the members of the VDC had demonstrated their ability to manage public resources for village improvements.

But the study does not indicate whether any villages subsequently acted to elect a new headman based on his good record of service with NSP funds. We should also ask whether any individuals have gone on to serve the public in higher offices, at the district or provincial or national levels, after first demonstrating that they could serve the public well in an NSP Village Development Commission. If not, then it might be worth asking what barriers have prevented such democratic political advancement from local to national politics, which has regularly strengthened national democratic competition in successful democracies.

Conversely, looking from the other direction at the problem of connecting the national government with local politics, we could also ask how the professional careers of government administrative officials might have been affected by an experience of working in the National Solidarity Programme. Have administrative agents become more valuable to the national government after the NSP gave them a deeper familiarity with local politics in remote villages throughout the country?

More generally, my point is that research in development economics should regularly consider questions of comparative local politics. Whenever I hear a talk about research on the economic problems of a poor community, I hope that the speaker might take a few minutes to talk about the forms of local leadership in the community. Who adjudicates local disputes? Who manages public resources or coordinates communal efforts for local public improvements? Conversely, when we search for ways to strengthen the capacity of the state to provide essential public services for national development, we should not ignore the wide supply of trusted leadership that already exists in local communities throughout the nation.

Successful modern development depends on getting the essential fundamentals right, and the key is to recognize what is essential. The 2020 pandemic reminded everyone that modern urbanized development has implicitly depended on medical advances and government investments in public health, to defend great communities against threats of infectious disease. But we have argued here that that development economics is incomplete when comparative local politics is ignored. National governments serve people best when they share public responsibilities with locally accountable local governments. If this basic point is realized in more nations then our best hopes for global prosperity in the post-pandemic decade can be fulfilled.

Back to Table of Contents

Embarking on a transformative journey through six chapters, we traverse India's landscape, exploring pioneering startups and their revolutionary...

• Sustainability
• Agriculture
• Brand Campaigns
• Watch inspiring videos
• Advertise With Us
• Press Coverage

Follow Us On

Download App

15 Progressive Indian Villages That Will Make You Want to Ditch Your City Life Right Away!

From renewable energy to organic farming, here are 15 Indian villages that have walked the talk and are shining examples of what a community can do when it comes together for a better tomorrow.

“The future of India lies in its villages”- Mahatma Gandhi.

I n today’s world, Gandhi’s words that India’s survival depends on the well-being of its villages seem even more pertinent.

Seventy percent of India’s population – roughly one-tenth of humanity – live in the countryside. This makes rural India a focal point for issues of national and global concern: the impact of high population and development on natural resources; lack of sanitation and its impact on health; water pollution from raw sewage and pesticide runoff; soil loss and desertification due to erosion, overgrazing and deforestation.

This is also why the ability of India’s villages to offer fulfilling lives to their inhabitants is germinal to India’s future as a great global power.

Photo Source

Over the years, a few of India’s resilient rural villages have been trying to remain relevant and adapt to change without losing their valued traditions and skills that have survived down the ages.

From renewable energy to organic farming, here are 15 Indian villages that have walked the talk and are shining examples of what a community can do when it comes together for a better tomorrow.

1. dharnai, bihar.

Once struggling to get basic electricity like most villages in India, Dharnai has now changed its fate and become the first village in India to completely run on solar power. Residents of Dharnai had been using diesel-based generators and hazardous fuel like cow dung to meet the electricity requirement for decades, which were both costly and unhealthy. Since the launch of Greenpeace’s solar-powered 100 kilowatt micro-grid in 2014, quality electricity is being provided to more than 2,400 people living in this village in Jehanabad district.

2. Payvihir, Maharashtra

An obscure village in the foothills of Melghat region of Amravati district in Maharashtra, Payvihir, has set an example for the country by consistently showing how communities and NGOs can work together to conserve the environment and ensure sustainable livelihood for people.

In 2014, Payvihir bagged the Biodiversity Award from the United Nation’s Development Programme for turning a barren, 182-hectare land under community forest right, into a forest. Recently, the village also came up with an out-of-the-box idea of selling organic sitafals (custard apples) and mangoes in Mumbai under their brand Naturals Melghat!

Read More Here :  From Growing Its Own Forest to Selling Organic Fruits, This Village Funds Its Own Development

3. Hiware Bazaar, Maharashtra

Amid the desperate denizens scrounging for water in the drought-affected parts of Maharashtra stands a village that has not felt the need to call a single water tanker – in fact, it hasn’t called for one since 1995. The village also has 60 millionaires and the highest per-capita income in India.

Facing a major water crisis each year because of the measly rainfall it gets, the village decided to shun water-intensive crops and opted for horticulture and dairy farming. Their consistent water conservation initiatives led to rising groundwater levels and the village started to prosper. Today, the village has 294 open wells, each brimming with water just as the village brims with prosperity.

4. Odanthurai, Tamil Nadu

Odanthurai, a panchayat situated in Mettupalayam taluk of Coimbatore district, has been a model village for the other villages for more than a decade. The panchayat has not only been generating electricity for their own use, but also selling power to Tamil Nadu Electricity Board.

Having already won international acclaim through its unique welfare schemes and energy self-sufficiency drives, Odanthurai near Mettupalayam has begun efforts to develop a corpus of Rs 5 crore to install wind and solar energy farms. This project will enable free supply of electricity to over 8,000 residents.

For contact details, click here .

5. Chizami, Nagaland

A small village in Nagaland’s Phek district, Chizami has been scripting a quiet revolution in terms of socioeconomic reforms and environmental protection for almost a decade. A model village in the Naga society, Chizami is today visited by youth from Kohima and neighbouring villages for internships in the Chizami model of development.

What is unique in the Chizami model of development is that marginalised women have played an important role in bringing about this socio-economic and sustainable transformation that is rooted in traditional practices of the state.

Read More Here :  A Tiny Naga Village Has Been Spearheading Women’s Rights & Sustainable Farming for Almost a Decade

6. Gangadevipalli, Andhra Pradesh

If India lives in its villages, then the model it perhaps must follow is Gangadevipalli, a hamlet in Andhra Pradesh’s Warangal district where every house has the bare necessities of life, and more. From regular power and water supply to a scientific water filtration plant, a community-owned cable TV service and concrete, well-lit roads, this model village has been steadily gaining in prosperity thanks to a disciplined and determined community that has also managed to work in harmony towards goals set collectively.

7. Kokrebellur, Karnataka

Kokrebellur, a small village in Maddur taluk of Karnataka, offers you an unusual and mesmerizing sight as you’ll find some of India’s rarest species of birds chirping in the backyards of these village homes. Named after the Painted Storks, which are called Kokkare in Kannada, this small village (which is not a reserved bird sanctuary) has set an example of how birds and humans can co-exist in complete harmony. The villagers treat these birds as a part of their family and have also created a small area for wounded birds to rest. Birds are so friendly here that they even allow you to go very close to them.

8. Khonoma, Nagaland

From being a cradle of resistance to the British colonial rule, Khonoma has come a long way to become India’s first green village. Home to a 700-year-old Angami settlement and perfectly terraced fields, this unique, self-sustaining village in Nagaland is a testament to the willpower of the tribal groups of Nagaland to protect and conserve their natural habitat. All hunting is banned in the village, which also practices its own ecofriendly version of jhum agriculture (instead of the traditional slash-and-burn method) that enriches the soil.

Also See:   VIDEO – This Wallflower Of A Settlement In Nagaland Is India’s First Green Village

9. Punsari, Gujarat

Punsari village, barely 100 km from Ahmedabad, could be a textbook case of development. Closed-circuit cameras, water purifying plants, biogas plants, air-conditioned schools, Wi-Fi, biometric machines – the village has it all. And all of it was done in a matter of eight years, at a cost of Rs. 16 crore. The man behind the transformation is its young tech-savvy sarpanch – 33-year-old Himanshu Patel – who proudly states that his village offers “the amenities of a city but the spirit of a village.”

10. Ramchandrapur, Telangana

The first village in Telangana region to win the Nirmal Puraskar in 2004-05, Ramchandrapur came into focus a decade ago when the villagers pledged to donate their eyes for the visually challenged. Among its many achievements, all the houses in the village have smokeless chullahs and toilets with tap-water facilities. It is the first village in the state to construct a sub-surface dyke on the nearby river and solve drinking water problems by constructing two over-head tanks in each house. The village does not have drainage system and all the water generated from each house is diverted to the gardens, which are planted by the villagers in each house.

11. Mawlynnong, Meghalaya

In the tiny hamlet of Mawlynnong, plastic is banned, spotless paths are lined with flowers, bamboo dustbins stand at every corner, volunteers sweep the streets at regular intervals and large signboards warn visitors against littering. Here, tidying up is a ritual that everyone – from tiny toddlers to toothless grannies – takes very seriously. Thanks to the tireless efforts of the village community, this small, 600-odd-person hamlet in Meghalaya is today renowned as the cleanest village in India and Asia.

12. Piplantri, Rajasthan

For the last several years, the Piplantri village panchayat has been saving girl children and increasing the green cover in and around it at the same time. Here, villagers plant 111 trees every time a girl is born and the community ensures these trees survive, attaining fruition as the girls grow up. They also set up a fixed deposit for the girls and make their parents sign an affidavit that ensures their education.

Over the last nine years, people here have managed to plant over a quarter million trees on the village’s grazing commons. To prevent these trees from being infested with termite, the residents planted over 2.5 million aloe vera plants around them. Now, these trees, especially the aloe vera, are a source of livelihood for several residents.

Read More Here :  This Village in Rajasthan Plants 111 Trees for Every Girl Child Born. Thanks to One Man’s Vision.

13. Eraviperoor, Kerala

At a time when the country is abuzz with talks about Digital India, and how technology can be taken to the remotest corners of the country, the Eraviperoor gram panchayat in Pathanamthitta district of Kerala is leading way. It is the first gram panchayat in Kerala to have free Wi-Fi for the general public.

The village has also launched a free palliative care scheme for the poor and is the first panchayat in the state to get ISO-9001 certification for its Primary Health Centre. It has also been recognised as a Model Hi-tech Green Village, by the Horticulture Department, for its green initiatives.

14. Baghuvar, Madhya Pradesh

A small village in Madhya Pradesh, Baghuvar is the only village in India that has functioned without a sarpanch since independence, and that too efficiently. Every house in the village has its own lavatories and there is a common toilet complex that is used for social functions. The village has underground sewage lines as well as the highest number of biogas plants in the state. The gas produced is used as cooking fuel and to light up the village. Thanks to its unique way of water conservation, this village also has enough water to survive drought-like conditions for years.

15. Shikdamakha, Assam

Way before Swacch Bharat, in 2010, a remote Assam village had set cleanliness goals for itself. Shikdamakha, near Guwahati, runs cleanliness drives and competitions, and wants to surpass Mawlynnong in Meghalaya as Asia’s cleanest village. A plastic-free village that earned the maximum points in the cleanliness sub-index of Union Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, Shikdamakha has also earned the coveted Open Defecation Free status recently.

Feature Image Source

Like this story have something to share email:  contact@thebetterindia. com , or join us on  facebook  and  twitter (@thebetterindia) . new log into  www.gettbi.com  to get positive news on whatsapp..

If you found our stories insightful, informative, or even just enjoyable, we invite you to consider making a voluntary payment to support the work we do at The Better India. Your contribution helps us continue producing quality content that educates, inspires, and drives positive change.

Choose one of the payment options below for your contribution-

By paying for the stories you value, you directly contribute to sustaining our efforts focused on making a difference in the world. Together, let’s ensure that impactful stories continue to be told and shared, enriching lives and communities alike.

Thank you for your support. Here are some frequently asked questions you might find helpful to know why you are contributing?

Sounds Interesting? Share it now!

This story made me

Tell Us More

• Get positive stories daily on email
• Join our community of positive ambassadors
• Become a part of the positive movement

• Child Labour Elimination
• Job Creation
• Skill Development
• Natural Resource Management
• Sustainable Waste Management
• Village Uplift Programme
• Co-Founders
• Board of Trustees
• Group Organisations
• Global Presence
• Entrepreneurs Booklet
• COVID-19 Brochure
• Annual Reports
• Our Partners
• Training Programme
• Testimonials
• Stories Of Change

Blog - Village Uplift - The story of a village in India and its transformation

The story of a village in india and its transformation, by hand in hand india on village uplift, 15th february, 2019.

Village development is key to the development of a country. We take the case of Visoor village in Tamil Nadu, where transformation is led by groups of women.

In the quiet little village of Visoor in Tamil Nadu, late afternoons are when streets are empty and the village seems to be taking a nap. The silence is interrupted however by high pitched voices of women from near the village well. The group is headed by a feisty middle-aged woman, Kalamani. The group discusses their finances and Kalamani tries to address the problems faced by members. They may be just a group of village women, but this group and others like them are heading a revolution.

The future of India lies in its villages, said M.K Gandhi. More than 60 years later, the villages of India continue to thrive. Indian agriculture contributes to 18% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product and is also the source of employment to almost 50% of India’s population.

However, there is one factor that pulls down the development of these villages — poverty. The economy of villages is primarily dependent on that of income of the male member of the family. While the men head out to work, women manage the house but do not contribute in a large way to the household income.

We at Hand in Hand India have taken up Village Development with a motive of ending poverty through job creation. In Tamil Nadu’s Visoor village where we work on uplifting the village, we saw the women come together to lead the transformation.

The heroine of our story, Kalamani is looked up to in many ways by the women around her. She runs a mini-provision store that supplies the villagers with grocery and other essentials. Hand in Hand India with corporate partners has been empowering women with relevant skills and training them to contribute to their family income. Kalamani received a loan of INR 30,000 from HiH India to set up her petty shop. From a monthly earning of INR 6000, she now earns INR 9000 per month. The income partly goes towards her household expenses, while also increasing the stocks in her store. Every month sees a new item being added to Kalamani’s petty shop.

Kalamani stands proud in her shop

There are others like Kalamani too, such as Parameshwari who lives opposite Kalamani’s shop. This young lady with a bachelors degree was wondering how to add to her family’s income when she joined HiH India’s ‘Sewing Machine Operator course’. She started off experimenting with her baby’s clothes, moved on to her own and then to those of her neighbours. From then to now, Parameshwari has become quite a tailor and earns INR 3000 a month with her newly acquired tailoring skills. Eventually, she hopes to find employment in large tailoring units when her daughter grows up.

Parameshwari shows off her Tailoring course certificate

In Visoor’s agricultural landscape, milch animals are an important source of income.

When Renganayaki took an INR 30,000 loan from HiH India to buy a cow, she was thinking of supplementing the family’s milk source. But today, the cow she bought has given birth to another, enabling Renganayaki to supply milk to the neighbouring cooperative earning INR 3000 per month. HiH India’s veterinary camps are a huge help to agriculturalists like Renganayaki in keeping her cows healthy, providing them vaccinations and treatments free of cost!

Visoor’s women are today a force to reckon with, thanks to their newfound financial independence. With skills and earning power in their hands, they are out to change the landscape of their village. Hand in Hand India aims to work with them and guide them to grow.

Hand in Hand India’s Village Uplift intervention operates across India transforming villages through a multi-pronged approach. We tackle poverty through skill development, job creation and creating healthy communities. Read more about us here .

More blogs for you

How sakubai, a rural indian woman got to know a nobel peace prize winner.

• Natural Resource Mangement

The Good Earth

Adapting to the post-covid world – six women entrepreneurs from rural india show the way, job creationour opinions, 8 tips to rebuild indian msmes in the post-covid world.

• Solid Waste Management
• Village Uplift
• Our Opinions

©2022HandInHandIndia

Maintained by HIHIndia

• Terms & Conditions
• Privacy Policy
• Refund & Cancellation
• Disclosures

• Increase Font Size

12 Importances of Villages Studies

Dr. Vijeta Dr. Vijeta

Content of this unit

Introduction

• Definition & size of a Village
• Socio-Political Scenarios
• Social order & its’ Impacts
• Political Structures in Villages
• Economic Structures & Scenarios in Villages
• Types of Village Studies
• Conclusions

Learning Objectives: From this content, one shall be able to know about the main three parts regarding the issues for which a village study is important-these are Social-political studies, economic studies (though both may interfere & overlap with each other in certain areas) & scientific studies. Socio-political shall also include historical aspects.

In one of his famous quotes, the most famous leader of 20th century India, Mahatma Gandhi said “ India is not Calcutta and Bombay. India lives in her seven hundred thousand villages ”. This is what forms a clue to the magnitude of importance, the ‘village’ acquires in socio-economic sphere in India in particular & the world in general. The cosmopolitan cities of today, London, New York, Mumbai etc. have also had their genesis in being a village once upon a time, though quite long ago.

1.   Definition & size of a Village:

To understand the importance of village studies, one has to first understand as to what qualifies as a ‘village’ in demographic terms. As per India Census’ 2011, all places with a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area committee, etc. so declared by a state law are called statutory towns. Places which satisfy the following criteria are called census towns:

• A minimum population of 5,000;
• At least 75 per cent of the male main working population engaged in non-agricultural pursuits; and
• A density of population of at least 400 persons per sq. km. (i.e. 1000 per sq. Mile)

The villages thus hold a residuary definition, i.e. the places which do not fall under the category of census or statutory towns, are termed as the villages. As per Census 2001, total number of villages were 6, 38,596 out of which only 5,93,731 villages were inhabited. Approximately, 68.6% of total population of India resides in villages as per Census’ 2011. In terms of number, it is approximately 84 crores persons out of total 121 Crore human populations. If ratio of other countries is seen, one of the most developed regions, Scandinivian countries (comprising of Denmark, Norway, Sweden & part of Finland) have 13-15% of population residing in rural areas while United States of America (USA) has approximately 18% of its people as rural population. In developing countries of Asia, like China, India, and Thailand etc. the ratio is always more than 45%.

Having seen the size of rural population in India & the world, it is now easier to comprehend that any socio-economic development indicator of a country or the world has to, necessarily, reflect the situation in villages.

2.  Socio-Political Scenarios:

The studies of social structures start with a group of individuals & in such scenario, the small group of individuals residing in a hamlet or a small village constitute first basis of studies of bigger groups e.g. towns & semi-urban areas. The interactions of a human being with another in sociological aspects do  not differ much in urban setting though the variables of interaction e.g. the language, the physical environment, the motives etc. may differ.

According to Sir Charles Metcalfe, “ The village communities are little republics having nearly everything that they want within themselves and almost independent of any foreign relations .”

Srinivas (1975) on methodology and perspectives on village society, begins by referring to the lack of a tradition of fieldwork in the social sciences, other than in social anthropology (or, to an extent, in sociology), and the consequent damage done. Lack of fieldwork affected the growth and development of the social sciences by alienating them from grassroots reality, which in turn resulted in woeful ignorance about the complex interrelations between economic, political, and social forces at local levels. According to Srinivas, the reason for the lack of a fieldwork tradition was the implicit assumption that people are like dough in the hands of planners and governments, and the illusion that, through “social engineering,” “directed social change,” and the like, governments could change the lives of the people. Srinivas refers to participant observation as a great asset and a highly productive methodological aid, particularly in the study of culture and social life. He shows the relevance of participant observation as a method even for those interested in regional, state, or national studies. It can serve as a system of apprenticeship, can help in interpreting other data on social institutions, and can be a crucial aid to intellectual development. Participant observation need not be only for small communities.

Beteille (1972), focuses on constraints to fieldwork, and explains how these very constraints can serve as a source of insights into society and culture. The article provides a graphic account of the tribulations involved in participant observation when living in a highly stratified village.

By contrast, Nehru never identified with the idea of the village as the site of future transformation. He considered the notion of “village republics” as characterized by various ills. He was critical of caste hierarchies and saw no virtue in reviving the traditional social order. He was sceptical of the Indian village becoming economically self-sufficient.

Ambedkar had first-hand experience of village life as a Dalit child. To those who wished to perceive the village as representative of Indian civilisation, Ambedkar offered a radical critique of the Indian village. He characterised village republics as being nowhere near democratic, but as being the ruination of India. To him, the village is a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness, and communalism – marked by exclusion, exploitation, and untouchability.

2.1     Social order & its’ Impacts:

In the villages of India, the residential quarters are often built based upon a strong caste system. The ties of caste & community in a village often cut across the economic classifications of a population. For example, a poor person from a particular caste or community will have more loyalty with & will identify more with economically well-off person of same caste/community. At the same time, social mobility within a caste/community may not always depend upon the economic status of a person. The Britishers themselves had fueled the casteism by creating zamindari (the upper caste persons responsible for collecting land revenue for the British on a commission basis) & Ryatwari (the lower caste peasants who received occupancy rights of land only after payment of money to Government). This system though was officially abolished in India after Independence; still the percentage of land holding by lower caste persons is lesser than higher caste persons.

To understand the social interactions amongst various communities separated by physical spaces, the field studies are required so that implications of the same upon semi-urban areas can be deduced. The marriages as well as family relations are found to be stronger amongst people of same community. At the same time, the loyalty a caste/community group feels may not surpass the religious boundaries & tensions may be created between followers of different religions when larger issues arise. This situation is far more serious in rural areas & may give rise to law & order situations as the reach of police authorities in far-flung rural areas may not be immediate.

The essay on modernization, occupational mobility, and rural stratification by Sharma (1970) is based on fieldwork in Rajasthan in 1965–66, that is, in the early post-Independence phase, when substantive changes were not yet in evidence. The author observes that occupational diversification depended on structural and cultural factors, and in terms of both, the upper castes were in an advantageous position. They had a near monopoly of jobs with high incomes, prestige, and power. The author concludes that modernization is not a Universalist phenomenon in India and it does not necessarily weaken traditional institutions like caste.

“Particularistic” modernization strengthened traditionally privileged and elite groups, and weakened the position of the expropriated. One example of this nature was Muzaffarnagar rioting in the year 2013 where, for the first time in the history of the district, the large scale rioting happened in rural areas. Such scenarios, if studied well by village visits, will produce ways to tackle & prevent the law & order situations well within time in other rural & semi-rural centers. Similarly, the causes & impacts of gender-related unreported crimes, incidences of which are high in rural areas, can be studied by visiting the villages.

2.2      Political Structures in Villages:

Strengthened by the Seventy-third amendment to constitution of India in 1992, Panchayati Raj institutions have been empowered to administer the needs of a village in a largely autonomous way. The term ‘Panchayat’ means ‘assembly’ while ‘raj’ means ‘rule’. These existed in India even before 1992 but the Constitutional amendment brought in more uniformity across the states in terms of structure as well as brought in more economic grants to these bodies. Though there are slightly different versions of the basic structure prevalent in North-east India, the three-tiered system of these institutions can be understood by way of a chart as below:

The adult franchise of citizens of a village system is adopted in electing the Gram Panchayat members &   a head ( sarpanch or Pradhan ) once in every 5 years. The elected members of panchayats falling under a block elect the members & chairman of ‘block Panchayat’ which in turn goes on to form district Panchayat. Since the power to utilize the funds allocated to development of a village/block/district is given to a Panchayat, especially in case of village Panchayat, the head of the panchas (members) holds a big socio-economic clout in the village. This means that, politically, the alignment of a village electorate during elections for state assembly or Parliament may depend upon inclination of ‘Panchayat’ members to a large extent. To assess the effect of rural population over political outcome of elections & political systems, it is important to emphasize that field studies are taken up in villages.

Karanth (1987) studies the impact of new technology on traditional rural institutions. New technology here is represented by a shift in the economy of a Karnataka village from predominantly grain production to sericulture. The impact of the new technology on the traditional institution of jajmani  (here adade ) is analysed. Karanth finds that institution of adade adapted itself to suit the changing needs of the people.

In principle, the reservation of various sections of society (women, scheduled caste/scheduled tribe etc) is in place for formation of the Panchayats to encourage the participation of various social groups in political and economic development of villages. However, the realities may be very different from the idealistic formations. For example: instead of elected woman sarpanch, her husband may be actually carrying out all the work. Similarly, when a seat is reserved for backward castes, a person of such caste will be fighting the elections but actually it will be a former sarpanch of higher caste backing him up behind the scenes. Such proxy elections, their extent & negative effects in totality can be known only when village visits are undertaken. This will also give results as to how much is the actual empowerment, of weaker categories of society, in our Panchayati Raj Institutions. Internationally, many villages, not many of them Indian, have a system called ‘customary villages’ wherein the community leadership, instead of elected leadership, holds influence. The examples are the villages of Afghanistan. In an interesting study, Jennifer Brick has found that public goods are provided routinely and effectively in villages throughout the country despite political chaos. She had argued that customary organizations are the primary source of order in Afghanistan not only because they can extract and redistribute resources from villagers, but because they are constrained in their ability to do so. She brought out that constraints such as the separation of village powers and local checks and balances facilitate local predictability despite national-level chaos. By analyzing the productive role of informal organizations in the provision of public goods, her paper brings local politics into the study of state building in post-conflict or fragile environments.

Similarly, in year 2001, National Commission to review the working of Constitution had brought in consultation papers on ‘ Empowering and Strengthening of Panchayati Raj Institutions/Autonomous District Councils/Traditional Tribal Governing Institutions in North East India’. Parts of such papers were based upon actual fieldwork undertaken by the members of advisory panel of the Commission.

In Andrea (2002) conducted an assessment to determine water supply and sanitation coverage and identify water supply and sanitation problems in the village and then propose solutions to improve water supply and sanitation coverage.

The above studies as well as other studies of similar nature show that fieldwork through village visits can throw not only grounds for constitutional but policy changes as well.

3. Economic Structures & Scenarios in Villages:

There are two sources of income in rural India- agriculture and non-agricultural activities. Agriculture includes farming & allied activities such as dairy business, pisciculture etc. while non-agricultural activities are- vocational (cobbler, weaver, blacksmith etc.) and industrial (employment in factories situated in rural areas).

Share of agriculture in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of India is approximately 15%. India’s GDP grew at 7.3 per cent in financial year 2014-15 but agriculture growth was hardly 0.02%. This means that over 68% of India’s population contributes only 15% towards economic output of the country & that too at a yearly pace of below 1%! This is what gives, in the simplest form, a picture of number of people living below poverty line. At the same time, it also shows that if as a country, we can make rural economy & agriculture grow faster, say, at the rate of 2-3% yearly (world average of developing & developed nations), the number of poor people will come down immediately by, say, 3-4 time.

In a re-study of one of the famous “Slater villages,” Iruvelpattu in Tamil Nadu, John Harriss, J. Jeyaranjan, and K. Nagaraj (2010) bring out the dynamics of rural transformation over the twentieth century. There has been a decline in the proportion of cultivator and agricultural labour households. Agriculture has increasingly been mechanized, as shown by the large number of irrigation pump-sets, tractors, power tillers, and combined harvesters in the village (which is no longer an agricultural village). Non-farm employment accounts for 40 per cent of all employment.

Due to varying geological & spatial factors, agricultural products & crops (both per year as well as in production per hectare) differ from one place to another. For one, agricultural activities in India (except a part of Indo-Gangetic plains) are dependent upon monsoons. The optimum rainfall gives way to better agricultural output. Any excess or short rainfall brings floods & drought, both producing stress in rural areas’ economic & socio-political lives. This is why the predictions of monsoon every year can make even the stock-markets play around.

A    Credit Suisse report, The Great Indian Equalization (2012) found that over the preceding six years, rural districts delivered higher economic output than cities. According to the report, 75% of new factories built in India in the last decade were located in rural areas, indicating the diminishing role of agriculture in rural livelihoods. But to study the real impact of these developments on economy of such villages and to study the impact of rural economy on Country as well as factors responsible for stagnated growth of agriculture, it is imperative for policy makers, academicians & administrators to go for comprehensive & year-on-year village visits. Both farming & non-farming activities are strengthened if Government assistance reaches the eligible in timely & efficient fashion. As discussed  in preceding paras of this article, the political set-up designates Village Panchayat as the body to coordinate & execute the projects sanctioned by or planned by the Government. The finances are provided by the district administration to the Panchayat head ( Sarpanch or Pradhan ) to carry out various schemes such as currently ongoing National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGA) as well as to execute common & routine beneficiary measures- old-age & widow pensions, building of road & drainage, sanitation, public distribution system (PDS) etc. Now-a-days, Panchayats have been given greater say in supervision of rural health centers, primary schools, schemes for welfare of women & children.

The actual delivery of these education, health & welfare related services as well as monetary assistance to actually eligible people is a great concern in administration. The corruption and leakages in delivery of economic help leads to reduced rate of development of poorest of the poor. Non-supervision & indifferent attitude towards delivery of services in healthcare & education in rural areas makes indicators of social & physical development of country lag behind as a whole. To find sources & reasons of ineffective implementation of welfare schemes & other services under the indirect or direct supervision of Panchayats, it is necessary that village visits are undertaken. Once reasons & sources for such deficiencies are known, the methods to plug the same can also be found.

To make the economic development faster in rural areas, it is required that industries are located in villages, at least in those villages which do not have too fertile a soil but are either near the bigger urban markets or near the ports. For this, it has to be ensured that basic utilities-roads, electricity is present & law & order are maintained. In a Case Study of Village Neriga, Karnataka, India, Intel executives found that the key challenges faced by the villagers were lack of healthcare & lack of awareness about education, limited availability of electricity & safe drinking water though basic cell phone connections were available in each home. The company based upon such study invited young entrepreneurs to apply innovative technology-aided solutions for education, healthcare & other needs of the community.

Similarly, in Thamna village in Anand district of central Gujarat, farmer Ramn Parmar is perhaps the first farmer in the country to sell power harvested from his own farm & in June 2015, he got first cheque of Rs. 7500/- for the 1500 units of surplus power that was produced in his farm and was fed to the electricity grid during the last four months. The payment was made by International Water Management Institute (IWMI), which with the help of MGVCL (Madhya Gujarat Vij Company Ltd) — a state electricity discom — has set up this demonstration project in the village, as a viable business model for farmers who wish to harvest solar energy and add to their agricultural incomes (http://indianexpress.com).

Similarly, since 2007, Kabbigere village in Karnataka has been generating power and selling it to the grid through biomass. The gram panchayat sells the biomass generated power to Bengaluru Electricity Supply Company. This project is a joint initiative between UNDP- BERI along with the GEF, ICEF and Government of Karnataka’s Department of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj. Studies reveal that the village generated about 400,000 kWh of electricity in 2007. This equals the annual consumption of 6,000 rural households and has helped ensure more reliable electricity supply in the area. The above examples demonstrate how a systematic & scientific approach towards study & solutions for problems faced by the rural population can be effective.

It is not only the social-political & economic studies that can be undertaken by the students, researchers as well as administrators, in medical sciences also, it is important to carry out field studies to find out the ways & means to tackle a disease which may be specific to geographical locations.

4.  Types of village studies

It is now clear that to understand the problems & challenges faced by the large percentage of population of the country, village studies are need of the hour be it in socio-political or economic fields. The question arises as to what kind of studies should be carried out- macro level (small number of samples representing large picture) or micro level (larger samples covering maximum number of permutations amongst geo-political differences). The answer depends upon the type of problem that one is trying to solve. For example, the public delivery system (PDS) is more or less common across the country & the problem of leakages at various levels will also be the same. Hence, if smaller sample data but across the states is taken up, it should throw common thread of problems & likely solutions. However, if a social or political issue is taken up, it may need larger sample sizes spread across larger geographical space.

The decades of 1950 & 1960s were the times when sociologists & social anthropologists carried out extensive research in villages of India. Jodhka (2012) wrote about village studies. The companies also undertake studies in villages to assess the markets as well as part of their social corporate responsibilities. The motive of the former studies is to find ways & means to enhance profits of the company or the business while purpose of the latter studies is to carry out welfare measures for the community. It may be possible that certain welfare measures undertaken by a company will lead to increase in profit (though indirectly) in the form of enhanced goodwill. Integration of profits with enabling economic development in a cooperative form is found best in the white revolution in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Haryana & other such states where, for example, the Amul brand of dairy products has been very successful market leader & has been standing tall even amongst the competition from the multinational & private companies.

5. Conclusions:

According to Srinivas (1975):

[The] social sciences are drawing too heavily on a small range of human experience, viz. the western– industrial, and equating it with the global. (Built into that equation is an ethno-centric assumption on the part of many westerners that all societies are travelling towards the ultimate goal of a western– industrial type of society.) Indian social scientists have a responsibility to resist such an equation, firstly, in order to better understand their society, and secondly, to contribute to the greater universalisation of their disciplines.

It has been established in the preceding paras, that village studies are important not only for academicians but for policy makers, administrators, corporate and scientists equally. Such studies undertaken with proper methodology & with defined objectives bring out the reasons or factors affecting an issue but also the possible solutions.

In one of his famous quotes, the most famous leader of 20th century India, Mahatma Gandhi said “ India is not Calcutta and Bombay. India lives in her seven hundred thousand villages ”. The studies of social structures start with a group of individuals & in such scenario, the small group of individuals residing in a hamlet or a small village constitute first basis of studies of bigger groups e.g. towns & semi-urban areas. In the villages of India, the residential quarters are often built based upon a strong caste system. The ties of caste & community in a village often cut across the economic classifications of a population. To understand the social interactions amongst various communities separated by physical spaces, the field studies are required so that implications of the same upon semi-urban areas can be deduced. In principle, the reservation of various sections of society (women, scheduled caste/scheduled tribe etc) is in place for formation of the Panchayats to encourage the participation of various social groups in political and economic development of villages. Due to varying geological & spatial factors, agricultural products & crops (both per year as well as in production per hectare) differ from one place to another. It is now clear that to understand the problems & challenges faced by the large percentage of population of the country, village studies are need of the hour be it in socio-political or economic fields. The question arises as to what kind of studies should be carried out- macro level (small number of samples representing large picture) or micro level (larger samples covering maximum number of permutations amongst geo-political differences). The answer depends upon the type of problem that one is trying to solve.

• Andrea, C. (2002): A water supply and sanitation study of the village of Gouansolo, Mali, West Africa. Proceedings of Michigan Technological University.
• Beteille, A. (1972). The Tribulations of Fieldwork. Economic and Political Weekly , 1509-1516.
• Brick, J. (2008): The Political Economy of Customary Village Organizations in Rural Afghanistan. Proceedings of University of Wisconsin – Madison, USA.
• Bull, G., Harris, J., Lloyd, J., & Short, J. (1989) : The electronic academicals village. Journal of Teacher Education , 40 (4), 27-31.
• Harriss, J., Jeyaranjan, J., & Nagaraj, K. (2010). Land, labour and caste politics in rural Tamil Nadu in the 20th century: Iruvelpattu (1916-2008). Economic and political weekly , 45 (31), 47-61.
• Jodhka, Surinder S. (ed.) (2012): Village Society, Orient Blackswan, Hyderabad, and Economic and Political Weekly, Mumbai, pp. 252.
• Karanth, G. K. (1987) : New Technology and Traditional Rural Institutions: Case of” Jajmani” Relations in Karnataka. Economic and Political Weekly , 2217-2224.
• Sharma, K. L. (1970). Modernizations and Rural Stratification: An Application at the Micro-Level. Economic and Political Weekly , 1537-1543.
• Srinivas, M. N. (1975) : Village studies, participant observation and social science research in India. Economic and political weekly, 1387-1394.

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Language Acquisition
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Media
• Music and Culture
• Music and Religion
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Society
• Law and Politics
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Ethics
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Games
• Computer Security
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Ethics
• Business History
• Business Strategy
• Business and Technology
• Business and Government
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic History
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Systems
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Theory
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Politics and Law
• Public Policy
• Public Administration
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

1 The Study of Villages and the Understanding of Development: Building the Evidence

• Published: August 2018
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

This chapter introduces the idea of the village study as a lens through which to examine and learn about economic development. The particular advantages of longitudinal village studies—tracking the village and its inhabitants over time—are described. The specific features of the Palanpur study, which make it unique and particularly valuable amongst longitudinal village studies in India, are highlighted. Amongst these are the long—seven-decade—duration of the study, the universal coverage of the village population, the wealth and quality of the quantitative data that has been collected, as well as the complementary availability of detailed qualitative information. The chapter reviews lessons for the general practice of household survey data collection and survey methods from the specific experience of the Palanpur study, highlighting the value of credibility and building a relationship of trust between field investigators and survey respondents.

Signed in as

Institutional accounts.

• GoogleCrawler [DO NOT DELETE]
• Google Scholar Indexing

Personal account

• Sign in with email/username & password
• Get email alerts
• Save searches
• Purchase content
• Activate your purchase/trial code

Institutional access

• Sign in with a library card Sign in with username/password Recommend to your librarian
• Institutional account management
• Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Sign in through your institution

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institution’s website and Oxford Academic.

• Click Sign in through your institution.
• Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
• When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
• Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institution’s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Sign in with a library card

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see ‘Sign in through society site’ in the sign in pane within a journal:

• Click Sign in through society site.
• When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

• View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
• View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Rights and permissions
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Urban Villages, Their Redevelopment and Implications for Inequality and Integration

• Open Access
• First Online: 17 November 2021

Cite this chapter

You have full access to this open access chapter

• Ya Ping Wang 25  

Part of the book series: The Urban Book Series ((UBS))

5431 Accesses

1 Citations

1 Altmetric

Urban villages are a unique product of China’s rapid urban expansion. They provide a new way of life sustained by property rental income for local villagers. More importantly, urban villages provide cheap accommodation for millions of rural migrant workers in most large cities. Recently, with the increasing demand for land by commercial developers and public projects, urban villages have become the targets for redevelopment. This chapter uses a case study village in Beijing as an example to assess the social and economic impacts of urban village redevelopment on both the original local inhabitants and migrants in rented accommodation. The case study village went through a very long and complicated redevelopment process from 2004 to 2017 involving different stages of demolition and relocation. It provided a rare opportunity to evaluate the effects on the local population, both pre- and post-redevelopment. The study involved several field visits, observation and interviews with village residents. It shows that urban village redevelopment offered no positive benefits for migrant workers who often lost their homes to demolition. For local villagers, redevelopment and relocation into new flats may improve their living conditions. However, most suffer from the loss of long-term economic and income generation opportunities. Moreover, the new property rights for the replacement flats confer no additional rights of citizenship for the relocated villagers who remain ‘second-class citizens’ within Chinese cities.

You have full access to this open access chapter,  Download chapter PDF

Similar content being viewed by others

A Genealogy of Redevelopment in Chinese Cities

Examining China’s Urban Redevelopment: Land Types, Targeted Policies, and Public Participation

Urbanisation and Urban Villages: An Overview of Slum Communities in India

• Urbanisation
• Urban villages
• Village redevelopment

1 Introduction

Urbanisation, industrialisation and globalisation have rapidly transformed China from a traditional agricultural-based society into a global economic powerhouse over a period of just 30 years. China’s urban population grew from 20% in 1980 to 60.6% in 2019 (State Statistical Bureau 2020 ). However, the country’s rapid economic development and urban growth remain unbalanced across different regions and social groups. China boasts some of the most impressive modern urban landscape globally, and some Chinese cities are among the most expensive places to live. Simultaneously, social divisions, income inequality, environmental pollution, traffic congestion and ecological degradation all pose serious problems to urban residents and policymakers. Many of these problems and challenges are clearly manifested in the so-called urban villages (城中村).

In pre-Communist China, major coastal cities developed under Western influence and took on very different forms to traditional inland cities and towns (Murphey 1980). This colonial versus Chinese division was replaced by urban/rural divergence supported by the hukou (residence registration) during the early years of the Communist period from 1949 to 1976. Towns and cities housed the non-agricultural population and functioned as bases for industrial development and administration, while people living in villages remained peasant food producers. China’s rapid entry into the global economic system since the 1980s has created new social and spatial divisions (Wang and Murie 1999 ; Wang et al. 2009 ). Traditional rural villages alongside the fast-growing suburban areas of major cities were either partially urbanised or entirely overrun by rapid urban sprawl. These villages have been physically absorbed into towns or cities, but they retain many traditional characteristics in the composition of their buildings and populations. This distinctive phenomenon within Chinese urbanisation has changed the simple dichotomy between the rural and the urban, to create a third category of residential space: the ‘urban village.’ Their populations comprise large numbers of rural migrants (the ‘floating population’). Modern business and commercial districts, occupied by ‘official’ residents and linked closely with the global economic system, form a sharp contrast with informal and poor residential areas represented by urban villages.

The most publicised early urban village in the 1990s was probably Zhejiangcun (浙江村) in Beijing. Located in the south of the city, the Zhejiangcun district comprised 24 administrative villages with around 100,000 migrant workers in 1995 (Liu and Liang 1997 ). Since 2000, almost all villages located within commuting distances from a city have been turned into urban villages in the prosperous Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta regions. Traditional family houses have either been extended or demolished and replaced with narrow high-rise buildings to provide rental accommodation to migrant workers. Shenzhen and Dongguan near to Hong Kong, where the migrant population outnumbers local residents many times, are two extreme cases. When the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) was set up in 1980, the government initially took a piecemeal approach to land acquisition from local villages for development. As urban development intensified and more land was taken out of agricultural production, all traditional villages became urban villages in some form.

Traditional Chinese villages were all integrated holistically with agriculture. The layout of the village settlement was also simple. Each family often occupied a small courtyard, which contained one or several simple one- or two-storey houses built of bricks and timber. The courtyards were normally arranged in rows with streets running between them. Larger and richer families occupied more buildings and more yards. As cities grew and the demand for rental housing increased, unplanned and unauthorised building activities multiplied out of control in many suburban villages. New houses were constructed with modern materials such as steel and concrete. In Shenzhen for example, 80% of post-1990 buildings constructed in urban villages by individual families were between 6 and 9 storeys high. Another 5% were over 10 storeys, and some even reached 20 storeys (Shenzhen City Urban Village Redevelopment Planning Working Group 2004). In order to maximise floor space, only very narrow gaps were left between buildings. This practice resulted in extremely high density and the so-called ‘kissing buildings.’ It was said that people in different buildings could kiss each other through their windows. A Shenzhen government report showed that urban villages in 2004 occupied a total land area of 9,204 hectares. There were altogether 307,000 privately owned dwellings, of which 44% were constructed after 1999. The average size of construction floor space per building was 343 square metres (Shenzhen City Urban Village Redevelopment Planning Working Group 2004). In Futian District alone, there were 15 urban villages; together, they occupied 390 hectares of land and housed 572,100 migrants and 19,300 local villagers (China Academy of Urban Planning and Design, Shenzhen Branch 2004).

In other cities, the scale of urban village development was not as large. Nevertheless, in the inland city of Xi’an, for example, among the 624 administrative villages located inside the six urban districts and four development zones, 286 were officially classified as urban villages in 2010. These urban villages housed 370,000 rural residents. The inner-city areas contained 72 urban villages. These villages had 25,000 households and 89,800 people, most of them rural hukou holders. Xi’an also includes three suburban districts and counties, where another 40 villages with a combined population of 90,000 were classified as urban villages (Xi’an Municipal Urban Village Redevelopment Office, 2010). All these population figures only include the original village inhabitants. If migrants were included, the total population would be at least several times larger.

There is an increasing volume of literature on urban villages in China (Yeh 2005 ; Lin 2006 ). Papers produced outside the country are more concerned about the rights of local residents and migrants, working class living conditions, poverty and the politics of land and property rights, etc. (Fan 1996 , 2001 ; Ma and Xiang 1998 ; Knight and Song 1999 ; Solinger 1999 ; Wang 2004 and 2019). Researchers often link China’s migrant experiences to the international experience and some compare Chinese urban villages with slums in other developing countries (Wang et al. 2009 ). Inside China, urban villages have been a controversial issue for many years. Mainstream academic and policy researchers have focused on the negative aspects of unplanned and overcrowded developments, crime and poor safety records, serious health, environmental and sanitary problems. To them, urban villages are the ‘tumours’ of cities and must be redeveloped. These arguments are often based mainly on the city’s overall economic, infrastructural and environmental considerations. Urban village redevelopment rarely considers the interests and needs of a large number of migrant residents.

More recently, particularly since the implementation of its 12th Five Year Plan (2010–2015), the Chinese government has begun to address these serious urban inequality problems through an integrative and transformative strategy—effectively introducing a new style of urbanisation. The strategy aims to integrate economic, political, social, cultural and ecological development. Transformative development policies shifted from urban and rural division toward urban-rural integration and equality; from economic and industrial development toward social development; from environmental degradation toward environmental improvement. These policies have important socio-economic, political, physical, and environmental implications for cities, and especially urban villages. To build a harmonious urban society, residents living in urban villages must be integrated into the local urban communities. Long-term migrants must also receive the same citizenship rights as others to enable them to settle in the city and access the social and economic rights they are entitled to. Urban inequality, segregation and integration have also become hot research topics. However, such policy changes and newer research emphases have not changed the overall direction of planning policy, which still inclines toward the elimination and redevelopment of urban villages, especially in districts with high land values. Policies focus mainly on physical changes rather than social and economic upgrading of the poor communities living in the urban villages.

This chapter will focus on the urban village redevelopment processes and its implications for inequality and integration. I shall do this by looking closely at the changes of a case study of urban villages—SC Village, located in the northwest suburbs of Beijing. SC Village is interesting because it has been undergoing redevelopment since 2000. Unlike the redevelopment of other villages that are normally completed in a couple of years, the relocation and redevelopment process in SC Village happened sporadically for over 15 years. The authorities only achieved complete demolition and relocation in 2017. The prolonged process highlights many issues and problems associated with the urban village redevelopment programme. I will discuss the background context, the long and messy process of redevelopment, the gains and losses of the original villagers and other stakeholders involved, and the impacts on migrants who rented accommodation there. I will question the extent to which urban village redevelopment leads to social integration and as well as the reduction of inequality. The findings are based on continuous monitoring and observation of the redevelopment process over a number of years. I visited the original village and replaced housing estates between 2009 and 2018 and conducted interviews with residents before and after relocation.

2 Urban Village and Land Ownership

Access to land is a central issue because it is a crucial asset for food production and a key factor for shelter and community development. How issues related to rights of access are addressed in development projects and programmes has a direct impact on the livelihood and security of people not only in rural areas, but in urban and peri-urban settings as well. Failure to address the land tenure interests of all stakeholders in land development or land reform can cause problems and inequalities. These problems can unintentionally fall on the most vulnerable and disadvantaged members of society. (FAO 2002 , p.1)

This statement from the Food and Agricultural Organisation’s tenure studies provides a guiding principle for dealing with land issues in fast urbanising regions. It also offers a good theoretical perspective for discussion and analysis about land development in China. Before we look at our case study for urban village redevelopment, it is important to have some understanding of the Chinese rural and urban land management system.

Chinese land reforms in the 1950s created two different types of land ownership for urban and rural areas. In urban areas (including the officially defined suburban areas), land was nationalised and municipal governments became the legal owner of land on behalf of the state. In rural regions, inherited and unequal private family land holdings were firstly redistributed across the villages to give poor families their share. After several collectivisation movements in the 1950s, rural land ownership was centralised to the village level. Land owned by individual families was pooled for farming and all villagers became members of collective teams. Before the Communist era, individual families occupied residential land. After the reforms, collective team members worked together on the main agricultural land with a small proportion divided between families as private plots. From 1978, agricultural land was redistributed to individual families under the so-called ‘responsibility system’ in order to stimulate farming activities and increase grain production. Farmers were promised the right to hold onto the land for at least 15 years, later extended to 30 years, for production. Land ownership remained collective and individual families could not sell or change the land to other uses (Wu 1999 ; Cartier 2001 ; Zhu 2004 and 2005; Ho and Lin 2003 , 2004 ; Ding 2003 , 2004 ; Deng and Huang 2004 ; Yeh 2005 ).

Under this system of dual land ownership, there was a policy provision for municipal governments to take over collectively owned land for development. In the 1980s, when the land was taken over by municipal governments or other new users, mainly from the public sector under the socialist planned economy, they had to pay compensation to farmers. Simultaneously, new users and municipal governments had to arrange jobs for working-age farmers affected by the land transfer. As urban-based employment provided an alternative and more secure way of life to peasant farmers, the process did not cause much concern. Farmers also welcomed the practice because it provided them an opportunity to have a new life in cities or towns. As the urbanisation process intensified and the planned economic system was replaced by a market system from the early 1990s, municipal authorities and new land users, no longer all from the public sector, struggled to find suitable jobs for all those farmers affected. As a result, compensation changed from job assignments to alternatives such as cash payments and housing resettlement. Large-scale urban development coupled with the change of land transfer process created a serious problem of landless farmers and urban villages around all Chinese cities and towns.

The way that Chinese suburban villages are redeveloped is determined by the unique urban and rural land ownerships and the channels through which rural land is transferred into urban ownership. The definition of land ownership and the mechanism for a state monopoly of land development through compulsory purchase and taking over land may appear clearly defined. In practice, the process, especially compensation arrangements, is really problematic because collective land ownership is a very ambiguous concept, as this case study shows. Government land management officials, academics, and even some farmers believe that in socialist China, the village collective ownership of land is only another form of public ownership, and farmers use of land was granted by the government. When the state requires the land, the farmers have no other options apart from relocation or some form of compensation.

3 Urban Village Redevelopment: The Case of SC Village

SC Village is one of the six traditional settlements (natural villages) under the administration of SC Village Committee, itself part of the Haidian Zhen (Town or Township before 2011) in Beijing’s Haidian District. SC Village has a long history. During the Qing Dynasty, the village was an important agricultural, commercial and handicraft centre beside the Imperial Palace (圆明园). It benefited from the station of Imperial Guards from the 8th Military Division (八旗). Commercial activities in the village declined when the Imperial Palace was destroyed by European invasion at the turn of the twentieth century. SC Village remained predominately an agricultural area until 1949. Immediately after the Communist government land reforms, plots were redistributed to individual farmers. Between 1952 and 1958, various rural collectives were formed. In 1958, SC Village and several other villages in the area formed the Haidian People’s Commune, which was replaced by the Haidian Township in 1984. Farmland owned by the village was redistributed and contracted to individual families under the ‘responsibility system’ for farming. Throughout all these periods, village residential land was under the control of individual families.

From the middle of the 1980s and especially the 1990s, farm land owned by the village was taken over piece by piece by the Beijing Municipal Government or large public institutions for urban development. Villagers gradually switched from farming to other activities, such as seeking jobs in the city or setting up family businesses. Accommodation and room renting to migrant workers also became a major source of family income when urban sprawl reached the area. While most families had come out of poverty and became prosperous, they remained poor in SC Village like many other suburban villages. This was due to diversification of economic activities and the physical and environmental conditions in the village (SC Village Committee 2004). Houses in the traditional style were not well maintained. A lack of planning control encouraged new buildings and extensions inside the family courtyards to provide more rooms for either family expansion or for rent.

Most agricultural activities had ceased by 2000 and cultivated land was taken over by the municipal government and other public institutions. Rents from migrant workers became a major source of income. In 2010, on average, each family could earn about 5000 yuan a month from rent (interview with residents); but many villagers had to sacrifice their privacy and share their homes and facilities with lodgers. The village lacked some modern infrastructure, especially properly paved roads, sewage and drainage systems and private flush toilets. The large-scale increase in the migrant population made the living environment worse day by day. Foul-smelling sewage flowed openly along the sides of littered streets. Communal latrines and individual toilets in various traditional forms were dotted around the village with little by way of the planned structure. Various types of shops and services could be found along the main streets, including restaurants, food stalls, daily utility shops, barbers, electronic and car repairs, furniture, construction and DIY materials, distribution markets, waste collection and recycling, small and cheap hostels, etc.

SC Village began to plan for redevelopment in 1997. The scheme involved the relocation of villagers to new nearby high-rise housing estates to free the land for part of the city’s planned green belt. In 2000, SC Village Redevelopment Plan was approved as part of the Beijing Green Belt and suburban village renewal scheme. The Haidian Township Government established the Beijing Wangseng Real Estate Development Company Ltd to carry out the redevelopment in the same year. The new relocation housing was on a new nearby housing estate - WSY Residential Estate, about 500 metre away on a piece of remaining farmland owned by the village. Original villagers (homeowners, excluding migrants) were to relocate to this new housing estate. Construction work started in the autumn of 2000 and most buildings in the new estate were completed by 2004.

The completion of the new housing estate was intended to bring this traditional village into the normal life of the capital city and integrate the villagers with the local urban community. The physical changes were, however, not completed, nor were they matched by social developments. During visits each year from 2008 to 2015, it became apparent the old SC village was still there; only about half of the traditional houses were demolished before 2008. As relocation and compensation deals were negotiated between the residents and the developer on a family-by-family basis, some families accepted the relocation terms and moved to new flats in the WSY Estate. Their old houses were pulled down. Families who did not accept the relocation terms stayed. Demolition was selective and spread out across the village, so the remaining residents lived among the ruins of their neighbours’ demolished houses and blocked roads and streets (Fig.  6.1 ).

Traditional houses and street in SC Village, partially demolished in March 2008

3.1 Life in the Half-Demolished Village

The remaining families could not reach a satisfactory relocation and compensation agreement with the village authority and development company because they felt that:

The decision-making process lacked transparency and they were not properly consulted.

There was confusion over the organisation and responsibilities of the redevelopment process.

There was confusion over the relocation and compensation policies and practice.

There were unclear legal bases for the relocation.

Essentially, they were either not satisfied with the amount of cash compensation offered to them and/or with the new flat they might receive if moved. The remaining residents believed that powerful and rich families could bribe either the demolition company who carried out both the physical clearance and handled compensation on behalf of the developer, or the village leaders, who had control over the developer and the demolition company, for better deals. As a result, relatively poor families and larger families with small properties and therefore entitled to less compensation, had been left behind. Early movers were often given various incentives and had the right to select houses on the new estate, whereas those left behind had to choose from poorly located flats on undesirable floor levels or locations, for example elderly people may have to move to flats located on the 5th or 6th (top) floors. There were no lifts in these buildings.

Some complaints, such as the actions of corrupt officials, were verified by some of the ongoing building activities inside the partially demolished village. A one-story house was built in 2008, even after the demolition process had already begun. The new house also took over part of the old village street. The remaining residents cited this as an example of power abuse and corruption. ‘If they can build it, they will also have a way to claim compensation,’ said one local resident during the 2008 visit. There was no more evidence of demolitions between 2008 and 2015, but more new buildings were constructed over the demolished area. Some of the new buildings seen in 2010 were much bigger than traditional houses. They were up to three storeys in height with 10 to 15 rooms on each floor (Fig.  6.2 ). One new three-storey dormitory-style building had 10 rented rooms on each floor. The common corridors shared by tenants were well maintained. Rent for these rooms (about 12 square metres each) ranged from 550 to 650 yuan per month in 2010. The total rent for the whole building could be over 18,000 yuan per month. ‘The landlord did not live here. His family had a house somewhere else’, according to the caretaker of the building. Two new buildings next door were also three storeys in height, but were built together at the same time. They offered similar rooms for rent. ‘These buildings belong to two landlords, they are relatives,’ tenants reported. When villagers in both old and new areas were asked who built these new rental houses, they all indicated that it was village leaders. ‘Who else can do that?’ When asked whether they built on their original courtyard, the villagers replied, ‘No, they built on land freed by others.’ Did they build these houses for more compensation in the future? ‘Not necessarily, they just take advantage of the free land at the time. They know that the final clear up is not going to happen soon, by the time it has to be demolished, they will earn enough money,’ local residents said.

A new house built inside the half-demolished village

There appears to be no pressure for them to move for several years as for the remaining residents. As SC Village was planned as part of the green belt for the city, no commercial developer was there to push forward the relocation and demolition process. Suppose this land was planned for other uses such as commercial housing. In that case, the relocation process could be much faster and possibly even violent as commercial developers could not afford to wait so long. During the 2008 visit, a large bulldozer was parked at the entrance of the village, waiting to push more houses down. It had disappeared by 2010.

Collectively owned properties, as well as residential buildings, were also rented out to migrant workers. A row of enterprise workshops owned by the village was turned into a rental accommodation. Because of the poor quality and facilities, rent was 200 yuan per month in 2008, cheaper than the properly built dormitories. The old village committee office quarter was also rented out to migrant workers. However, the rental income from these collectively owned properties did not necessarily end up in the communal village fund. Some of these properties were ‘contracted out’ to individuals many years ago. Their contracts have not yet run out, although the use has changed from township industries or businesses to rented accommodation.

There were about 2000 original residents in the village before the relocation, and around half of them moved into the new estate. Local residents estimated that more than 30,000 people were living in this half-demolished village in 2010. The total population had definitely increased substantially by 2013. Most tenants were migrant workers from rural areas or other cities. Sanitary conditions in the village declined. The streets were very muddy and malodorous, with rubbish dumps scattered here and there, often on top of debris from demolished houses. More shops, restaurants, barbers, snooker halls and other amenities emerged to serve the increased population. A small supermarket also opened in the village in 2010. Despite the declining environmental quality of life, the economic activities in this half-demolished village were much more vibrant and dynamic in 2013 than in 2008 (Fig.  6.3 ).

Typical street of old SC Village in 2010: increasing economic activities and population, but declining living environment

3.2 Life in the New Housing Estate

The new housing estate, WSY Xiaoqu, consists of around 20 mainly six-story tenement buildings without lifts (Fig.  6.4 ). It was also visited several times since 2008. Most buildings were occupied during that time, manifested by the amount of clothes hinging at balconies, steel barbed-wire windows, and air conditioning units fixed on the external walls. Only a small proportion of buildings remained empty, still waiting for those who had yet to move in. The number of empty flats was definitely not enough to accommodate those left behind in the old village. Some residents claimed that powerful families had bought two or more flats, and some were sold to people who were not residents of the original village. Trees and gardens between buildings were more established and more cars were found parked beside the buildings in 2013.

Replacement flats in WSY (left) and new Village Committee office (right)

Those who had moved early were relatively happier when interviewed in 2008 because of the significant change in the general living environment and modern facilities that came with the move. However, the positive mood appears to have declined over time. ‘There were a lot of attractions for us to give up our old house and move into a new flat in this estate, but I personally would prefer to stay in my original home. My old house brought us steady rental income and the money looked after my whole family. In the new housing estate, we have no extra space to rent and we have to pay for everything. We have to earn money somewhere else to look after this flat. I know the living environment in our old village was poor, but we could have improved the environment rather than destroy it’ (Interview with a resident in 2010).

Another resident also said, ‘I miss our life as farmers very much. It was a pity to see our fertile cropland and houses being turned into open space. Our land had served us for generations. I don’t know what lies ahead for us and our children.’

When asked about life in the new estate, one resident summarised: ‘There were both advantages and disadvantages in moving here. In general disadvantages were more than advantages. The main problem is that in the past we could earn rent from our houses, now there is no such income, but we have to spend money every day on everything, including estate management fees. My family of three was given a flat about 90 square metres of floor space. After paying the costs of the new house, we also received about 600,000 yuan (other families could have more—700,000). This sounds a lot of money before you move. If everything is fine after the move, it can run for few years. If someone fell sick, the money could run out very quickly.’ ‘When you have nothing to do everyday, you tend to become sick easily. Many people my age now have diabetes’ (Middle age resident living in the estate).

‘Do you regret moving to here?’ ‘Yes, we should have stayed. Now they [the government] will have to pay a much higher compensation. The families who stayed behind will eventually get a better deal.’ ‘Why did you agree to move in the first place then?’ ‘They want Communist Party members, Communist Youth League members to set examples for others. Families were dealt individually, household by household behind doors. They offered a little more money as incentives each time, and we eventually gave up’ (Local resident).

New houses in the estate were the so-called xiaochanquan housing—those with limited property rights (小产权房)—as the land they occupy is still owned collectively by the village rather than the state. These houses cannot be legally traded in the open market. This seems not to have concerned some residents who continue to rent or to sell properties on the estate. Advertisements on walls inside the estate and at the nearby estate agency offices showed that in summer 2010:

A one-bedroom flat with furniture (56 m 2 ) in WSY could rent for 2000 yuan per month (equivalent to the rent of four rooms in the old village).

A two-bedroom flat with some furniture (80 m 2 ) could get 2500 yuan per month.

These rents were cheaper than similar flats in commercial housing estates in the area. A similar-sized two-bedroom flat on a neighbouring commercial estate could get around 3,000 yuan per month. A one-bedroom flat (64 m 2 ) at WSY was marketed for 960,000 yuan. The asking price for a two-bedroom flat (88 m 2 ) was 1.05 million yuan. These were one-off payment cash prices. As these properties do not have full property rights, no bank loans can be secured. These sale prices were also much lower than those in the commercial market housing estates. For example, the sale price per square metre of construction floor space in the neighbouring upmarket estate Boya Garden, was more than 50% higher than that in WSY. Not many ordinary residents in WSY could afford to sell or rent their flats, as these houses were their only homes.

The new estate is managed by an estate management company set up by the village committee. The estate management fee was relatively low compared with commercial housing estates (Table 6.1 ). On average, each family had to pay about 1000 yuan management fee per year. If there were highly paid workers in the family, this should not pose a problem. If there were only lowly paid manual workers, the advertised service sector wage in the area was around 1,500 yuan per month, the family will have to rely on the compensation money they receive. Residents seem to take the estate management issue casually: ‘If we cannot afford the fee, we don’t pay it. They [the Village Committee] have a lot of money from renting collectively owned properties and other business’ (Resident).

3.3 The Final Clearance

For a few years around the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, local authorities across the capital took a rather relaxed approach toward residential resistance to village redevelopment in order to avoid social disorder and confrontations. This was one of the reasons why the redevelopment process dragged for so long in SC Village. The half-demolished village was eventually cleared away in late 2016 and early 2017, more than 15 years from the initial launch of the village redevelopment project. The changing national and municipal political climate facilitated this move. At the national level, there was an emphasis on the improvement of the urban living environment and a campaign for speedy renewal of urban shanty towns. At the municipal level, there were policies to improve the general public images of the city, reduce the population of those on lower incomes, including migrants and removal of polluting industries. The municipal government had a very ambitious plan to reduce the total population in the six urban districts by 15% over five years (3% a year). To achieve this target, many political and economic measures were employed. By 2017, many small informal businesses were shut down, such as small restaurants, shops, fruits and vegetable stores/stands and markets, through the Comprehensive Urban Management (城市综合整治), and Health, Sanitation and Safety Inspection (卫生治安大检查) schemes. Lower end or informal economic activities such as waste/recycling material sorting and wholesale trade (批发市场) in Beijing were also moved out of the main urban areas and relocated to the surrounding provinces and counties. Most of these activities took place in urban village settings. The city government also turned its back on low-income migrants. The campaign aimed to eliminate informal commercial and employment activities, and premises which provide jobs for unskilled migrant workers. In the past, the informal sector flourished through the so-called waqiang kaidong (literally: replace walls with shops and open windows for commercial activities). The new policy aims to mend and repair the walls and close the window shops in residential areas. Any unplanned extensions of buildings used as commercial activities can be demolished.

Urban villages like SC Village became the target for clearance. In August 2016, SC Village Residential Committee relaunched the relocation project, which involves 1224 yards/houses and 3149 persons across an area of 216,000 m 2 (Xu 2019 ).

The main reasons given by the Village Committee for the redevelopment project were:

Improving the general living environment in the district.

Beautification of the area.

Reduction of non-local population.

New relocation flats were built and made available in a nearby new housing estate—Lijingyuan (丽景苑小区). Families and residents with local hukou rights were given another chance to sign the relocation agreement with the developer. The relocation and compensation arrangements for traditional house owners include:

A new flat in the new housing estate with a standard allocation of 50 m 2 floor space per qualified person for only locally registered hukou holders.

Housing floor space in an existing house could be exchanged for new housing, provided it fits within the 50 m 2 standard.

If old housing floor space is large, cash compensation will be given for extra floor area (above 50 m 2 per person) at 40,000 yuan/ m 2 .

Only housing floor space with legal and registered entitlement will be exchanged or compensated.

Under this new political climate, it is not surprising to find that most remaining families quickly accept their location terms and move away. By the March 2017 visit, over 95% of the remaining families had signed the compensation agreement, and only a few of the original houses remained standing. Posters with large characters were hung on these houses issuing strong warnings to put pressure on the remaining residents to move. The water supply had been cut and one woman fetched water from a nearby tap which continued to run. The electricity supply remained on. Interviewees said that there was great pressure on them to accept the terms and move. Some of them were still not happy for the same reasons given previously: ‘People with connections and power can negotiate a better deal for their family.’ But all agreed that they had to move eventually. By late 2017, the whole area was cleared for the city park. The general compensation scheme appears better than that offered during the last round, when only 30 m 2 replacement houses were allowed. The unit cash compensation for larger houses was also higher, but house prices in the area had at least tripled. No residents expressed regret at not moving during the first round. Although they have lived in poorer conditions for another 10 years, they could now enjoy larger replacement housing floor space (50 rather than 30 m 2 ).

3.4 Impacts on Renters and Migrants

The impact of the redevelopment of SC Village on migrant workers was similar to that of other urban village redevelopment schemes across the country, losing their temporary home without relocation arrangement and compensation. The only option was to move away from where they had been living. The notice in large characters placed upon the walls in SC village for migrants is very telling:

…. All accommodation-renter friends, you have been living in SC Village  for some time and your intelligence and hard work have made great contributions to the local economic development and environmental protection. We are very grateful! …… you come from all over the country, but all have high moral and civilised standards, hope you can see the overall picture …. Understand and support our redevelopment works; find new production and living places as soon as possible to ensure the smooth redevelopment work (SC Village Residential Committee 2019).

No one cares where migrants and other room renters go. In most cases, migrants will try to find a similar type of accommodation nearby for living or business operation, normally in another urban village slightly further away from the city centre. In SC Village’s case, the delay in demolition and the revival of the old village gave migrant families many more years stay in this preferable location, with affordable housing and good access to nearby jobs. The development of informal economic activities in the village also provided many of them with employment opportunities; although their living conditions were similar to those in other urban villages, they were very poor in comparison to new and properly planned and built areas. With the more recent round of redevelopment, migrants all face very serious challenges. As large-scale urban village redevelopment clears away many areas similar to SC Village, the housing choices for low-income migrants become fewer and fewer. One of the main overall urban priorities for the municipal government is to reduce the low-income population. This means many migrants who lived in SC Village may have to move to other cities or return to their rural homes in other provinces.

A male migrant lived in SC Village for more than 10 years, running a waste collection and recycling business. He was one of the few left in the village in 2017, cleaning some old aluminium window frames from the ruins when interviewed. His wife only joined him recently. She worked as a cleaner in the area and earned about 2000 yuan per month. They have two grow up children, neither of them living with their parents. Due to the redevelopment, they have to find a new place to live and work. Informal waste collection and sorting are unwelcome in the city; they may have to give up and return home.

Beijing does not welcome migrants anymore. Many small businesses and shops were shut down. We cannot find reasonable food anymore. In the past, we could get a bowl of noodles for around 10 yuan, not anymore. … We migrants cannot afford to eat in proper restaurants, the only way now is to buy instant noodles from the supermarket. … For a large city like Beijing, migrants are necessary, why drive us all away? (Migrant living in the village).

3.5 Other Parties in the Redevelopment Process

The redevelopment of urban villages involves a change of land use from agricultural activities to urban uses. The process is complicated and involves many other stakeholders. With the market reform in cities, land values increased substantially in all areas. Land-use changes have become a very contentious economic and political issue. We looked at the impacts of the process on the original village residents and migrant workers. This section will focus on the other main players involved in the project.

The Constitution and central government policies laid down the main guidelines for state land requisition, development and compensation. Local governments produce detailed policies on redevelopment and compensation levels for their area. In Beijing, the Municipal Construction Land Compensation and Relocation Methods list the bodies responsible for land requisition and compensation. At the municipality level, the Land and Resources Management Bureau controls land-related compensation and relocation management. The Labour and Social Security Bureau is responsible for the employment of working-age farmers and arrangement of social security such as pension and health insurance. The Civil Affairs Bureau looks after other, non-working age people affected by the requisition. At District and County level, the corresponding departments take the same responsibilities within their jurisdiction. Other relevant government organisations, including the township government are required to assist and help with the land requisition process. Rural economic organisations and village committees are required to assist the process and perform appropriate works (Beijing Municipal Government 2004). Figure  6.5 shows the main actors in the SC Village redevelopment process. This is also why residents in SC Village felt the whole process was confusing and they did not know exactly where responsibilities lay. They were dealing with the demolition company on the surface, but in reality, there was a thick web of interests and powers in the background.

Key stakeholders in village redevelopment and compensation

Firstly, the municipal government planned and negotiated the redevelopment project with the district government, the town/township government, and the village committee. The municipal government, in theory, has to make sure there is enough land for development; at the same time, it has to implement central government policies to protect agricultural lands and ensure a sufficient food supply. It also has an obligation to ensure farmers’ interests are protected when land is required. In practice, the national food security priorities were not on top of the agenda for municipal authorities, especially in the national capital city. Municipal governments are more interested in economic growth and meeting their financial demands. In relation to this particular village relocation project, it seems that the municipal and district government did not play a major role. In fact, the fate of the project was largely determined by the government even before it was started. The municipal government plays a crucial role in determining land uses and land values through its urban planning functions.

The value of a piece of land could be changed substantially by planning policies. While most fresh agricultural land in the surrounding areas has been appropriated and used for very profitable purposes, including commercial housing estates and the high profile Shangdi Information and Technology Industrial Park, the area occupied by SC Village and many other villages was intended to form part of the green belt in the northwest sector of the city. SC Village residents were to move into a high rise and higher-density new housing estates under the plan, and the land freed would be used for planting trees and open spaces. This reduced the market value of the traditional village residential area to nothing. To help with the village redevelopment and relocation, a municipal government fund had to be provided to pay compensation, which was often fixed and limited. This means that the SC Village redevelopment could never produce the millionaires created by other highly profitable redevelopment projects in the city. For SC Village residents, the redevelopment aimed only to improve their living conditions. This planning practice is very common in suburban areas of the city. In another case at the nearby village of Houying (后营), planning simply increased the original building density to enable redevelopment and also to accommodate villagers relocated from the neighbouring settlement of Liulangzhuang. The land freed by Liulangzhuang village was used for other purposes.

Another important issue for SC Village’s redevelopment was also determined by the government. Under normal circumstances, this type of redevelopment would involve a process of land ownership transfer from the village collectives to the municipal government, for both pieces of residential land—the old village and new housing estates. In SC Village, the old village residential land was taken over by the municipal government for the urban green belt and the Village Committee was compensated for helping with the redevelopment. In the case of the new housing estate, there was no change in village collective land ownership. The government only allowed this piece of agricultural land to be used for village relocation and housing development. This means the new housing estate remains a ‘rural’ community, rather than an urban community, with a ‘Village Residential Committee’, not an urban ‘Neighbourhood Committee’. Those residents who moved into the estate only own part of the property, the so-called ‘small rights’ property, because the land they occupy is not state owned. For ‘small rights’ properties, the title for all rural village houses, has a much lower market value in Chinese cities, as discussed above in the section on rent levels and house prices. The government also retains the right to redevelop these types of areas whenever it becomes necessary. This land ownership arrangement considerably differentiates the new housing estate from neighbouring commercial housing estates and the move to the new housing estate became less attractive to many of the original residents of SC Village. Even for these who moved, their integration with the urban community is not complete.

Under the municipal government, district authorities—the Haidian District in SC Village’s case—and the town/township government, Haidian Town, both played important roles in the redevelopment process. The implementation of municipal government land use and planning policies were carried through the District government and its relevant departments. The Haidian Town authorities were involved in the organisation of the redevelopment and direct negotiation with the Village Committee. Theoretically speaking, the Village Committee is a self-governing organisation of the rural collective and is made up by representatives from among the residents. In reality, the Village Committee is also the lowest branch of the government system, which follows orders from the Haidian Town authorities. When the government required village land, the Village Committee members had to face the choice between two different responsibilities: to help the government to secure the land for development or protect villagers’ interests. It is almost impossible for the Village Committee to stand against the government's wishes by holding back the land. At best, it can bargain for more compensation for both themselves and the village as a whole. In some instances, there was strong resistance from individual village committee members. This explains the reason that residents were often unhappy with their village and township leaders.

Rather than organising and carrying out the redevelopment directly, it is common practice for township government and village committees to hire demolition and development companies to implement the schemes. Ostensibly, this seems to follow the principle of an open market economy. It also avoids direct confrontations between the township/village officials and individual residents, which sometimes creates irregular opportunities that are difficult to check. Suppose the developer was a general commercial company for a piece of commercially valuable land. In that case, the township government and the village committee may work together on behalf of the residents for a better compensation scheme. In the SC Village case, the fixed amount of compensation came from the municipal government. This put the township government, the village committee, and the residents into very different negotiation positions. The developer was set up and owned by the township government with support from the Village Committee. This leaves individual families to struggle with the machinery of the whole development process, including their Village Committee, the demolition company, and the town government. It is not surprising that some poor and less powerful families were left behind.

4 Conclusion

Urbanisation is the process of converting rural residents into urban citizens, and citizenisation is therefore the essence of urbanisation. (Pan and Wei 2013 , p.3)

China’s urbanisation level has increased exponentially over the last three decades. About one-third of the urban population are migrants, some 240 million in 2013, and suburban landless farmers. These groups of people have often been segregated from the established urban residents, and their inequality is enormous. The integration of rural migrants and landless farmers in Chinese cities is a process known as citizenisation. To achieve the desired overall level of urbanisation, China needs to convert 390 million rural residents into urban citizens by 2030. Wei and colleagues at the China Academy of Social Sciences identified several areas of change that are essential indicators of a successful citizenisation process for individuals or families (Wei and Pan 2016 ). These include:

A change of social status from agricultural hukou registered at the migrant’s original village to local urban residence hukou .

Being granted full political rights: as migrant workers, rural residents do not have the right to stand for election in cities.

Being given access to social and public services: migrants do not have a right for many social and public services such as health, education, employment, social security and housing welfare.

A change in economic situation and life style: most rural to urban migrant workers are engaged in low level and low paid and insecure jobs. Their income is relatively low and their personal and family economic situation is often poor.

Development of cultural and other social capitals: it is often assumed that rural residents and migrant workers possess backward cultural habits and customs which are not suitable for urban life. The lack of proper education and training opportunities made their situation worse.

Finally, being accepted by the urban society where they live.

Measured against these criteria, SC Village’s redevelopment shows a very mixed picture. Firstly, it contributed little or nothing toward the integration of rural migrants who lived in the village. The final redevelopment ended their association with the village and loss of their rental and temporary homes in the area. The delayed demolition of the original village benefited the migrants most, as they (over 100,000 of them) gained a few peaceful and undisturbed years, though living under poor conditions. In relation to inequality, the redevelopment scheme increased rather than decreased the gaps between the migrants and other urban residents, both economically and politically. In terms of migrant integration and citizenisation, migrants have to find a new place in the city and start all over again.

For the original villagers, the landless farmers, there are obvious improvements in their general living environment. The modern flats in the new housing estates provide essential amenities and facilities such as water, electricity, gas, sewage and drainage. There are no more dangerous buildings, muddy roads,  or shared unhygienic toilets. Many families no longer share their houses with lodgers and enjoy some privacy. On the other hand, they have lost many economic opportunities. Traditional village houses had economic functions alongside the living spaces. There is no way that the new replacement flats can be extended to create more rooms for renting. Family members had to find secure jobs in the city to earn a good income. Many of them did not succeed and rely on the compensation payments, which could last for some years if there were no major costs such as medical bills or other emergencies. All these changes are related to the loss of control of the housing land they had for generations. Balancing the gains and losses, some residents felt the relocation was not a good move. Redevelopment is not the preferred choice for many villagers.

The redevelopment process may have a very limited effect on levels of inequality among the village residents. Families with larger residential plots and larger houses had more bargaining power and would receive both more compensation and relocation housing floor space. Large families with a smaller residential plot and smaller traditional houses would receive less compensation and smaller flats. A superficial comparison between urban villagers and other urban residents could conclude that the redevelopment process enables villagers to capitalise rural collective land ownership and exchange it for new and modern flats, bringing their lifestyle into line with the rest of the population. In reality, the loss of land resources could affect the economic life and community support network for this and future generations. Urban village redevelopment actually created a special category of residents, one that differs from other urban communities in property management and ownership. The only difference is that the whole village now occupies less land and people continue living in a self-managed high-rise settlement.

The unique situation in SC Village and the long period of confrontation between the developer, the officials and residents, provide a useful case study for understanding the problems associated with urban village relocation and redevelopment. Superficially, the problematic redevelopment process resulted from poor management and the corruption of local and village officials. A closer analysis highlights deeply-rooted problems within the Chinese land ownership system. The initial design of the project by the government resulted in unfair treatment of the villagers. Even if there was no local corruption, the new relocated housing estates would still have become second-class communities in the modern city. In this sense, if we must identify a loser, it would be the village as a whole, not just those who were left behind for years and only moved recently. In addition to the specific issues around land ownership system, there is a larger theme that comes through in many of the examples described in this case study, and that is the need for policymakers to think through more carefully the unintended consequences of reforms, and to respond more sympathetically and proactively to the concerns of those affected.

Beijing WSY Real estate management company (2010) Real estate management fee level at WSY estate (Unpublished public display information sheet)

Google Scholar  

Beijing Municipal Government (2014) Management methods for urban housing demolition, relocation and compensation in Beijing city. Unpublished local regulations (zjw.beijing.gov.cn/bjjs/xxgk/fggz/315165/index.shtml)

Cartier C (2001) Zone fever, the arable land debate, and real estate speculation: China’s evolving land use regime and its geographical contradictions. J Contemp China 10(28):445–469

Article   Google Scholar  

China academy of urban planning and design shenzhen Branch (2004) Shenzhenshi futianqui chengzhongcun gaizao zhanlue guihua [Shenzhen City Futian District renewal strategy and planning of ‘village in urban area’]. Draft unpublished report

Deng FF, Huang Y (2004) Uneven land reform and urban sprawl in China: the case of Beijing. Progress in Planning 61:211–236

Ding C (2003) Land policy reform in China: assessment and prospects. Land Use Policy 20:109–120

Ding C (2004) Urban spatial development in the land policy reform era: evidence from Beijing. Urban Studies 41(10):1889–1907

Fan CC (1996) Economic opportunities and internal migration: a case study of Guangdong province, China. Prof Geogr 48:28–45

Fan CC (2001) Migration and labour market returns in urban China: results from a recent survey in Guangzhou. Environ Plan A 33:479–508

FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations) (2002) Gender and access to land—FAO Land Tenure Studies 4. FAO, Rome

Ho SPS, Lin GCS (2003) Emerging land markets in rural and urban China: policies and practices. China Q 175:681–707

Ho SPS, Lin GCS (2004) Non-agricultural land use in post-reform China. China Q 179:758–781

Knight J, Song L (1999) The rural-urban divide. economic disparities and interactions in China. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Book   Google Scholar  

Lin GCS (2006) Peri-urbanism in globalizing China: a study of new urbanism in Dongguan. Eurasian Geogr Econ 47(1):28–53

Liu X, Liang W (1997) Zhejiangcun: social and spatial implications of informal urbanization on the periphery of Beijing. Cities 14(2):95–108

Ma LJC, Xiang B (1998) Native place, migration and the emergence of peasant enclaves in Beijing. China Q 155:546–581

Pan JH, Wei HK (eds) (2013) Annual report on urban development of China No. 6 rural population transfer and citizenisation. China Social Sciences Academic Press, Beijing

Shenzhen city urban village improvement overall planning working group (2004) Shenzhenshi chengzhongcun gai zao zongtiguihua dagang, chuzuwu chubu diaocha baogao [Shenzhen City urban village improvement overall planning outline, initial investigation report on private housing]. Unpublished report

SC Village Residential Committee (2019) Relocation notice to migrant workers in Old SC Village. (Unpublished public notice displayed on buildings in the village)

SC Village Committee (2008) SC Village  (History of SC Village and Its Redevelopment). Text carved on a stone tablet erected outside of new SC Village Committee office building

Solinger DJ (1999) Contesting citizenship in urban China. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA

State Statistical Bureau (2020) 2019 Report on national economy and social development in China. https://www.stats.gov.cn

Wang YP (2004) Urban poverty, housing and social change in China. Routledge, London

Wang YP, Wang YL, WU J S, (2009) Urbanization and informal development in China: Urban villages in Shenzhen. Int J Urban RegNal Res 33(4):957–973

Wang Y.P. & Murie A. (1999) Housing policy and practice in China. Macmillan (UK) and St Martin's Press (US)

Wang, Y.P. (2019) Migration and urban housing market dynamics in China, in B. Renaud, R. Chiu and L. Zhi Liu (eds) The great housing divide, Routledge (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy)

Wei HK, Pan ZG (eds) (2016) China’s rural development report: The establishment of a moderately prosperous society in all respects: Rural China in focus. China Social Sciences Academic Press, Beijing

Wu F (1999) The ‘game’ landed-property production and capital circulation in China’s transitional economy, with reference to Shanghai. Environ Plan A 31:1757–1771

Xi’an municipal urban village redevelopment office (2010) Urban villages and redevelopment in Xi’an. Unpublished internal annual work progress report

Xu R (2019) SC Village Shanty Town renewal is finally completed. online article at: https://www.bjhdnet.com/haidiannews

Yeh, A G O (2005) Dual land market and internal spatial structure of Chinese cities. In L.J.C. Ma and F. Wu (eds.), Restructuring the Chinese city, Routledge, London

Zhu J (2004) From land use right to land development right: institutional change in China’s urban development. Urban Studies 41(7):1249–1267

Zhu J (2005) A transitional institution for the emerging land market in urban China. Urban Studies 42(8):1369–1390

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

Ya Ping Wang

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ya Ping Wang .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Sheffield Methods Institute and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Gwilym Pryce

School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Institute of Urban Development and Environment, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China

Jingjing Shan

Rural Development Institute, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China

Rights and permissions

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Wang, Y.P. (2021). Urban Villages, Their Redevelopment and Implications for Inequality and Integration. In: Pryce, G., Wang, Y.P., Chen, Y., Shan, J., Wei, H. (eds) Urban Inequality and Segregation in Europe and China. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74544-8_7

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74544-8_7

Published : 17 November 2021

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-74543-1

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-74544-8

eBook Packages : History History (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• Learn English
• Universities
• Practice Tests
• Study Abroad
• Knowledge Centre
• Ask Experts
• Study Abroad Consultants
• Post Content
• General Topics
• Articles/Knowledge Sharing

Development of villages

This article describes about how developments can be done in villages in India and what amenities can be given to develop a village.

India is a land of countless villages.More than eighty percent of the Indian population lives in villages.That's why it is said that Real India lives i villages.So it is very important to give greater attention and concentration to them. The backwardness and underdevelopment of the rural areas have attention of not only the planners,but all those who are keenly interested in the all-round development of India.It is a pity that even after 50 years of independence there are no sanitary conditions,no means of living,no provision for housing facilities.Efforts should be made on a war footing for the improvement of the rural areas.In this regard,the youth who are the future citizens of India,have a vital role to play.The state governments and central government should come forward with new and useful schemes for the rural reconstruction and development.Most of the villagers are engaged in agricultural operations.But most of them have no knowledge of the modern techniques of increasing the produce.So the educated youth should guide and instruct them in the right direction. Many villages still lack the arrangements for pure drinking water.Even though there are wells and ponds,they become breeding center for mosquitoes.As there is no proper planned drainage system,the stagnant water results in several water born diseases. In villages some people grow vegetables and pulses.Some others earn their living by carpentry,weaving etc.The condition of the landless labors is very miserable.Most of them are either unemployed or underemployed.There is a large scale of illiteracy.There are no proper health and educational facilities.Moreover the villagers are born in debt,live in debt and die in debt.In order to prevent the youth from going to urban areas,the government should start cottage and small scale industries.Several farmers committed suicide because of the failure of crops.They could not return the loans taken from banks and money lenders.There should be some insurance facilities provided to save them. In order to develop our villages some of the following actions can be taken. 1.Villages should be provided with good transportation facilities. 2.There should be proper drainage,good sanitation facilities and electricity facilities should be provided. 3.Governments should undertake village development programmes for rural uplift. The Janma Bhoomi programme and the Rajiv Pallebata programme implemented in Andhra Pradesh yielded good results.There has been a green revolution under the guidance of Punjab and Haryana universities. 4.Medical and government health centres should be started. 5.Family welfare centers,technical training centers and rural banks have to be encouraged. 6.The Government should provide credit facilites and supply fertilisers at cheap rates. 7.There should be rural credit societies and land mortgage banks. Villages are the back bone of any nation.It is necessary that the villages should be uplifted to higher levels.Most of the raw materials and food stuffs are provided in villages.So by developing them,the overall development of the country can be achieved.

• Do not include your name, "with regards" etc in the comment. Write detailed comment, relevant to the topic.
• No HTML formatting and links to other web sites are allowed.
• This is a strictly moderated site. Absolutely no spam allowed.

Top Contributors

• Umesh (180)
• Neeru Bhatt (177)
• DR.N.V. Sriniva... (163)

About IndiaStudyChannel.com

Being the most popular educational website in India, we believe in providing quality content to our readers. If you have any questions or concerns regarding any content published here, feel free to contact us using the Contact link below.

• Admissions Consulting
• Adsense Revenue
• Become an Editor
• Membership Levels
• Winners & Awards
• Guest Posting
• Help Topics

STUDY ABROAD

• Study in Foreign Universities
• Study in Germany
• Study in Italy
• Study in Ireland
• Study in France
• Study in Australia
• Study in New Zealand
• Indian Universities
• Nursing in Mangalapuram
• BDS in Mangalore
• MBA in Bangalore
• Nursing admissions in Mangalore
• Distance MBA
• B Pharm in Mangalore
• MBBS in Mangalore
• BBA in Mangalore
• MBA Digital Marketing
• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use

Promoted by: SpiderWorks Technologies, Kochi - India. ©

• Skip to main content
• Skip to secondary menu
• Skip to primary sidebar
• Skip to footer

Study Today

Largest Compilation of Structured Essays and Exams

Need of Rural (Village) Development in India Essay | Importance

December 20, 2017 by Study Mentor Leave a Comment

India has 2 nd highest population as well as fastest growing economy among all countries. India is a promising future for industrialists, builders and investors. India is becoming a strong competent to Asian and European country in providing better facilities.

By naked eye we say that India is a developing country but development is generally seen in metropolitan city. By bird’s eye areas which are unreachable to government remain undeveloped or we can say that people tries to make that particular area untraceable to government.

But government changes as well as priorities change which helps to enlighten the growth of villages. Media plays a very important role in motivating the authorities such that particular village can get importance in their eyes.

Growth of a country starts with its own people. Development helps in increasing the economy of country. India is having thousands of villages which are present between Srinagar to Kanyakumari and Gujarat to Arunachal Pradesh. Village areas majorly depend on the small scale industries like fisheries, poultry or dairy farms and agriculture productivity.

The ministry for rural development has made certain rules and rights such that villagers should get equal benefits. Government of India has introduced project Bharat Nirman in collaboration with panchayat raj and state government. Bharat Nirman is a spectacular project which helps to raise the standard of living of villagers.

Table of Contents

Issue in villages

Villages are still lacking in getting uninterrupted power supply moreover they are unable to drinking water properly. They are using water which has been stored in wells and pond, which can create a home for mosquitoes.

Drainage system is improper as a result the stagnant water causes water born diseases. Among villagers some grow vegetable and pulses while other earns by doing small jobs like carpentry, tea stalls.

Most of them are uneducated and living a very miserable life due to the absence of basic amenities. Moreover villages born live and die in debt only. Due to certain reasons villagers commit suicide. In case of agriculture due to natural calamity or personnel issue they have to lose their crop because of which they are unable to pay the loans on time.

How to influence villagers

The youth who will become the future of this country, have an important role to play. While their growing days they know the position of village which has to be eradicated so that equality will be sustained among all citizens. Central government and state government trying to figure out the ways or schemes which will become a helping hand for villagers.

Educational facilities should be provided to village in their own village. This will help them to literate themselves and can make profit in their work. Media facilities are used by government to aware them regarding new technology or natural calamity so that they can save themselves.

Steps of development

• Village should have connectivity with the metropolitan cities such that they can commute without any problem.
• Awareness should be given to villagers regarding the sanitation and drainage systems which help them to keep diseases away.
• Currently electricity problem is high among villagers. Many villages don’t even get electricity for continuous 2-3 days. It should be improvised in an efficient manner.
• Government should provide organic fertilizers and credit facilities at cheaper rates
• Family planning is important information which should be encouraged.
• Gramin banks and technical training centers should be started.

Villages are nation’s backbone which is necessary for the growth of a country as they provide us the basic amenities. Villagers come to cities to do works in small scale industries and large scale industries.

India is an agricultural country which controls the 44% of the country’s GDP. Farmers are introvert and never try to change themselves. They oppose and never try to accept the new methods in industries and agriculture.

They always worship the rising sun and respect rules and regulations of a village. India remains a ground for irrational thoughts and superstitions. Because of lack of scientific knowledge, people still believes in superstitions.

Cottage industries are quite popular among people living in villages. These industries help to have a surplus occupation to agriculture. Industries provide employment during the off seasons to agriculturists and help to maintain the source of income.

These industries are basket-making, mud pot making, rope making, dyeing clothes etc. Under normal conditions these industries are not good because these are unable provide basic income. As a result villagers go to towns for employment in industries.

If we want to modernize them, first we have to educate them such that we have to describe the modern technologies and invention which directly or indirectly help them in sustaining their source of income.

Reader Interactions

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Top Trending Essays in March 2021

• Essay on Pollution
• Essay on my School
• Summer Season
• My favourite teacher
• World heritage day quotes
• my family speech
• importance of trees essay
• autobiography of a pen
• honesty is the best policy essay
• essay on building a great india
• my favourite book essay
• essay on caa
• my favourite player
• autobiography of a river
• farewell speech for class 10 by class 9
• essay my favourite teacher 200 words
• internet influence on kids essay
• my favourite cartoon character

Brilliantly

Content & links.

Verified by Sur.ly

Essay for Students

• Essay for Class 1 to 5 Students

Scholarships for Students

• Class 1 Students Scholarship
• Class 2 Students Scholarship
• Class 3 Students Scholarship
• Class 4 Students Scholarship
• Class 5 students Scholarship
• Class 6 Students Scholarship
• Class 7 students Scholarship
• Class 8 Students Scholarship
• Class 9 Students Scholarship
• Class 10 Students Scholarship
• Class 11 Students Scholarship
• Class 12 Students Scholarship

STAY CONNECTED

• About Study Today
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions

Scholarships

• Apj Abdul Kalam Scholarship
• Ashirwad Scholarship
• Bihar Scholarship
• Canara Bank Scholarship
• Colgate Scholarship
• Dr Ambedkar Scholarship
• E District Scholarship
• Epass Karnataka Scholarship
• Fair And Lovely Scholarship
• Floridas John Mckay Scholarship
• Inspire Scholarship
• Jio Scholarship
• Karnataka Minority Scholarship
• Lic Scholarship
• Maulana Azad Scholarship
• Medhavi Scholarship
• Minority Scholarship
• Moma Scholarship
• Mp Scholarship
• Muslim Minority Scholarship
• Nsp Scholarship
• Oasis Scholarship
• Obc Scholarship
• Odisha Scholarship
• Pfms Scholarship
• Post Matric Scholarship
• Pre Matric Scholarship
• Prerana Scholarship
• Prime Minister Scholarship
• Rajasthan Scholarship
• Santoor Scholarship
• Sitaram Jindal Scholarship
• Ssp Scholarship
• Swami Vivekananda Scholarship
• Ts Epass Scholarship
• Up Scholarship
• Vidhyasaarathi Scholarship
• Wbmdfc Scholarship
• West Bengal Minority Scholarship
• Click Here Now!!

Mobile Number

Have you Burn Crackers this Diwali ? Yes No

2024 Theses Doctoral

Essays in Development Economics

The primary focus of this thesis is to explore important factors affecting the manufacturing sector in developing economies, with a specific focus on India. The first two chapters of this thesis investigate how financial and land-related policy reforms can significantly impact firm dynamics and resource allocation in manufacturing industries. This contributes to our understanding of how targeted policy measures can lead to substantial changes in firm growth and innovation. Furthermore, the third chapter explores the development of contextually relevant measures to assess the scope of quality differentiation in manufacturing industries. The first chapter, Bank Expansion, Firm Dynamics, and Structural Transformation: Evidence from India’s Policy Experiment, examines the impacts of bank expansion on firm dynamics and labor allocation. This paper focuses on a policy experiment in India designed to encourage bank expansion in ``under-banked'' districts. Empirical findings demonstrate significant growth in manufacturing firms in these districts due to eased credit access, resulting in increased capital accumulation, sales revenue, and employment. However, the expansion predominantly benefited incumbent firms, with minimal stimulation of firm entry or product innovation. The reform also induced notable labor reallocation towards manufacturing sectors, particularly in areas with lower agricultural productivity. The second chapter, Land Constraints and Firms: Evidence from India’s Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act, empirically examines the effects of land constraints on resource allocation and innovation in manufacturing firms, leveraging the staggered repeal of the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act (ULCRA) as a natural experiment. The ULCRA, enacted in 1976, imposed restrictions on land holdings and transfers in India. The findings suggest that the repeal of the ULCRA significantly reduced land market frictions, leading to increased landholdings and transactions among affected firms, thereby enhancing their productivity and growth. The results demonstrate that easing land constraints plays a critical role in reducing misallocation and driving economic growth in the manufacturing sector. In the third chapter, Plants and the Scope for Quality Differentiation: An Empirical Study in India, a new proxy is introduced for determining the scope of quality differentiation in manufacturing industries, based on the slopes of Quality Engel curves. This proxy is empirically validated by establishing a positive correlation between price-plant size elasticities and the scope for quality differentiation. These findings suggest that the Engel slope may serve as a more suitable proxy for evaluating quality differentiation scopes, particularly in the context of developing countries. In all, the thesis not only sheds light on the intricate relationship between policy measures and industrial development, but also contributes to the understanding of quality differentiation in the context of emerging economies

Geographic Areas

• Economic development
• Economic policy
• Manufacturing industries
• Banks and banking
• Resource allocation
• Supply and demand

This item is currently under embargo. It will be available starting 2029-04-18.

More About This Work

• DOI Copy DOI to clipboard

• Anniston/Gadsden

68 Ventures proposes walkable, mixed-use village that keeps Fairhope charm

• Published: Apr. 25, 2024, 10:30 a.m.

An initial masterplan of Park City, which will be in Fairhope. 68 Ventures

• Mary Helene Hall | [email protected]

A walkable, mixed-use village could be in Fairhope’s future, according to discussion at the city’s most recent planning commission meeting.

The development, “Park City,” would be located at the intersection of Fairhope Avenue and Highway 181, which is near the city’s Walmart Supercenter and Aldi.

More from the Mobile Press-Register

• Press-Register Super 7: Ranking the top spring performances in the Mobile area
• Developers seek to fill in wetland near Orange Beach to create new community, marina
• Here’s what you should know ahead of the Gulf Shores High School groundbreaking this week
• Press-Register Power 5 softball: Who are the top Mobile-area teams?
• US News 2024: See south Alabama’s best public high schools

Stories by Mary Helene Hall

• Quiz: How well did you keep up with Gulf Coast news this week?
• Watch 110-year-old Alabama Power plant come crashing down
• Former Alabama State President William H. Harris dies at 79

If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Aurora Beacon-News | Oswego eyes adding students as non-voting…

Share this:.

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on X (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)

• Aurora Beacon-News Sports
• Aurora Beacon-News Opinion
• All Suburbs

Aurora Beacon-News

Aurora beacon-news | oswego eyes adding students as non-voting members of village commissions.

Oswego trustees are looking at involving youth in the village’s Cultural Arts, Economic Development and Historic Preservation commissions by having students serve as non-voting members of the panels.

“If we were to approve this, we should act quickly to coincide with the school year to get students up to speed. We probably would want to begin the application process before school lets out,” Oswego Village Administrator Dan Di Santo said in a report to trustees.

No vote has been taken yet on the proposal.

Oswego Village President Ryan Kauffman suggested staff members develop some of the parameters of a program that would have one student from each high school serve as a non-voting member of the three committees.

The administration has since consulted with Oswego-based school District 308 Superintendent Andalib Khelghati about the idea and reviewed a similar program in Naperville.

The superintendent thought including students on advisory commissions was a great idea, Di Santo said.

Khelghati offered to have the district help in the selection process of students for the commissions and supported the idea of including one student from each high school, the village administrator said.

Kauffman said he’s pleased to hear District 308’s superintendent is on board with the idea.

“This furthers our collaboration with the school district, gets kids involved and increases our involvement in the community at-large,” Kauffman said. “I think it is a win-win all the way around.”

District 308 already involves student members on its boards, Di Santo said.

Some of the proposed parameters for the village program would require students be residents of Oswego and that they attend 75% of scheduled meetings.

Oswego Trustee Jennifer Jones Sinnott also suggested the village designate a day out of the year for Oswego students to shadow village department heads.

“It would be a great opportunity if we could potentially look at a career day. I think it would be super cool to involve both high schools and have students shadow staff,” Jones Sinnott said.

“There are a lot of opportunities to engage and spark some excitement for kids,” she said.

The village as far back as 1999 considered the idea of a Youth Commission to involve students. However, it did not move forward with the idea at that time.

Assigning student representatives to village advisory commissions is an alternative idea to get young people involved in government, village officials said.

Linda Girardi is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.

More in Aurora Beacon-News

Waubonsee Community College breaks ground on new $60 million Technical Training Center

Column: ‘Senior Assassin’ game prompts warnings from Aurora area police, schools

Aurora Beacon-News Sports | Amelia Lohrey takes flight for Aurora Central Catholic, which makes sense. She’s working toward being a pilot.

Aurora Beacon-News Sports | With wind blowing in, Jake Niedzwiedz dials in for West Aurora. Does it work? ‘You can challenge a little more.’

Trending nationally.

• Pa. state police say pursuit ended with multiple dead
• US-required bridge inspections don’t test for ship strike. Then, one hit the Key Bridge.
• Boston police arrest 108 at Emerson College pro-Palestinian tent encampment
• In Tampa, Biden blames Trump for abortion ‘health care crisis’
• Reintroduced gray wolf found dead in Colorado

Gastonia residents express concerns over potential housing development

Charlotte-based developer NewStyle Communities is proposing a new 94-home development in Gastonia off of South New Hope Road. 

Residents of the Bethesda Oaks community, which borders the proposed development, are questioning whether the area can be responsibly developed. 

Bethesda Oaks residents gathered at City Church last week for a community meeting with the team looking to create what will be called South New Hope Village. 

Brock Fankhouser, the founder and CEO of NewStyle Communities, explained the plans for the community and fielded questions from the crowd. 

Several residents expressed concerns over traffic and greenspace. 

In addition to the proposed South New Hope Village, NewStyle Communities also began work in the area last year to develop 1776, a 55+ community with a focus on patriotism .   

Another developer is currently working on a multi-family home project near that section of South New Hope as well.

Initial responses from residents of the Bethesda Oaks community included questions about where children of the new homes would attend school and how working-age adults would get to work in the morning with additional traffic coming from nearly 100 new homes. 

According to Fankhauser, South New Hope Village will also be a 55+ community, which eliminates much of the worry over school and morning traffic because most in the community will be retired, he said. 

Residents are still concerned about traffic coming through their neighborhood if there are two entrances to South New Hope Village. 

Several residents suggested that the changes in unnecessary traffic could be mitigated by developers requesting one entrance to the village and a gated access reserved for emergency vehicles. 

Greenspace and privacy is another concern for Bethesda Oaks residents who say they don’t want all of the trees between their community and the new development to be removed. 

“We have a beautiful forest of trees back behind all of those homes, and we have some amazing wildlife that lives back there,” said one resident at the meeting. “What does that look like? Are you leaving the existing trees. Are you clearing the trees? What does that look like?”

According to Fankhauser, there will be a 25-foot buffer of undisturbed land between Bethesda Oaks and the new community. 

NewStyle Communities has not yet begun the process of rezoning for the development.

The developer hopes to go before the planning and zoning commission in June, Fankhauser said.

PHA shares initial redevelopment plans for Bartram Village in Southwest Philadelphia

The eventual redevelopment will total 600 housing units and potentially some commercial space for shops and eateries.

The Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA) on Tuesday unveiled the first phase of its sweeping redevelopment of Bartram Village in Southwest Philadelphia, with 64-units of mixed-income rental housing.

The Bartram Village public housing site at its peak hosted 500 units built in barracks-style buildings for defense workers in 1942. The first phase of the redevelopment plan is just south of that site, at 2639 S. 58th St., where townhouses, apartments, and amenities like a community room and playground will replace a vacant lot.

“We are actually doing our first phase on an off-site property because the Housing Authority is working through relocation with existing residents and figuring out what makes sense in terms of relocation and phasing on the actual site,” said Lindsey Samsi, a senior developer with national low-income housing developer Pennrose LLC, which is partnering with PHA on the project.

Historically, Bartram Village, which has a troubled history , has been home almost exclusively to very low-income residents.

The eventual redevelopment will total 600 housing units including some for ownership and potentially some commercial space for shops and eateries. The affordable rentals will target a variety of income levels.

That will be the case, too, with the first phase of the redevelopment, which will be reviewed by the city’s advisory Civic Design Review committee on May 7. Among the 64 units, 12 will be rented at market-rate, meaning there will be no rent subsidy.

“The idea is to deconcentrate poverty and to deconcentrate certain income pools,” Samsi said. “In an effort to do so, we mix in various income tiering within the affordable housing units and then 10 to 12 market-rate units” in the first phase of the project.

She notes that market-rate rentals in this part of Southwest Philadelphia are priced much lower than those to the north in Kingsessing , Squirrel Hill, or Cedar Park. The lowest-cost one-bedroom unit would be at $395 a month, while the highest one-bedroom could be up to $1,186. Tenants in subsidized units would pay a third of their income in rents.

PHA has been planning the Bartram Village redevelopment for six years and in 2023 received a coveted Choice Neighborhood Initiative implementation grant of $50 million from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Pennrose and PHA are hoping to break ground by the end of the year. The timing of the larger redevelopment is unclear as PHA looks for places for existing tenants to live in the interim. As in all of its large-scale redevelopment projects in recent history, PHA will ensure that current residents have a right to return to the redeveloped project when it is done.

“Relocation is very important to the residents, but also I’m hearing from residents that people want to remain in the neighborhood where they lived for generations,” Samsi said.

Prairie Village police arrest suspect involved in Kansas City chase

PRAIRIE VILLAGE, Kan. (KCTV) - A suspect is in custody following a police chase that spanned both sides of the state line.

Officers in Kansas City, Mo., tried to arrest a suspect wanted in a shooting. That driver refused to pull over and led police on a chase into Prairie Village early Tuesday morning.

Prairie Village police said its officers worked with other departments to use drones and K9 Blitz. They eventually arrested the suspect. Police said they found a gun in the suspect’s car.

The suspect is in custody suspected of multiple crimes.

Copyright 2024 KCTV. All rights reserved.

Deathbed confession leads to a solved 24-year-old cold case of a missing woman and 10-year-old girl

Man charged with first-degree murder in Blue Springs double homicide

Lithium battery fire causes fiery emergency on Johnson County street

Physical castration mandated for Springfield man who pled guilty to raping, impregnating teen

First intergenerational community breaks ground in Missouri

Latest news.

‘These are just ordinary people’: More Kansas Citians embracing ‘prepper’ way of life

Behind the Story: Who are preppers?

Former Chiefs star running back Jamaal Charles to announce pair of draft picks

First Warn Weather Days declared for severe threat Friday, Saturday

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Burkina Faso soldiers massacred 223 civilians in one day, finds rights group

Human Rights Watch demands investigation into killings in two villages just weeks after Russian troops fly in, amid intensifying conflict

Burkina Faso’s military summarily executed 223 civilians, including at least 56 children, in a single day in late February, according to an investigation into one of the worst abuses by the country’s armed forces for years.

The mass killings have been linked to a widening military campaign to tackle jihadist violence and happened weeks after Russian troops landed in the west African country to help improve security.

The massacre may amount to crimes against humanity, according to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), which urged Burkinabè authorities to launch an urgent UN-backed investigation.

Collating witness testimony and verifying videos and photographs, HRW researchers found that on 25 February, soldiers killed 179 people, including 36 children, in Soro village and 44 people, including 20 children, in nearby Nondin village, in northern Yatenga province.

The findings come days after UN officials and African leaders met in Nigeria to discuss solutions to counter the growing threat of terrorism on the continent, a conference that officials from Burkina Faso did not attend.

Experts noted that the killings occurred while US counter-terrorism strategy in the region was faltering , as the country increasingly pivoted towards Russia for its security strategy.

Burkina Faso’s military backed president, Ibrahim Traoré, hopes the alignment with Moscow will reshape the country’s near decade-long conflict with insurgents linked to Islamic State and al-Qaida.

A month before the killings, the first significant deployment of Russian troops arrived in the country, though there is no suggestion they were involved in the massacre.

Witnesses said it was beyond doubt that the atrocities were part of a long-running counter-terrorism campaign targeting civilians accused of collaborating with Islamist militants.

“The Burkinabè army has repeatedly committed mass atrocities against civilians in the name of fighting terrorism, with almost no one held to account,” said Tirana Hassan, executive director of HRW.

“Victims, survivors and their families are entitled to see those responsible for grave abuses brought to justice.”

Villagers said that on 25 February, military forces stopped in Nondin and then Soro, 5km away, and accused residents of being complicit with the jihadists.

“They said we do not cooperate with them [the army] because we did not inform them about the jihadists’ movements,” a 32-year-old female survivor from Soro, who was shot in the leg, told HRW.

In Soro, villagers described soldiers shooting people who had been rounded up or tried to hide or escape.

“They separated men and women in groups,” a 48-year-old farmer told HRW. “I was in the garden with other people when they [soldiers] called us. As we started moving forward, they opened fire on us indiscriminately. I ran behind a tree, and this saved my life.”

Witnesses in Nondin said soldiers went door to door, ordering people to come out of their homes and show their identity cards. They then rounded up villagers in groups before opening fire on them. Soldiers also shot at people trying to flee or hide.

The Burkina Faso government has been approached for comment.

• Global development
• Conflict and arms
• Burkina Faso

Most viewed