| Sumario: | Capitalist development in the last three decades in India has sharpened the class differentiation in agriculture. Increasingly, there is a sharp class division that is taking place between petty commodity producers and the capitalist farmers. The presence of a large number of petty commodity producers and informal nature of agricultural enterprise in India constantly reduces profitability, brunt of the crisis caused by this tendency is being borne by petty commodity producers. Forced by the pauperization, petty commodity producers are forced to diversify their incomes into wage activities in farm as well as non-farm activities. Indeed, all classes of farmers diversified their incomes away from agriculture, marking a structural transformation towards petty bourgeois capital on one hand and wage labour on the other. Pauperization of petty producers is also manifesting in a large number of suicides in the Indian countryside. The article provides empirical evidence for these processes at work in the Indian countryside.
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