Overview of rural labour market in India: size and key features, agricultural and non-agricultural
wage labour; Concepts of unemployment: seasonal unemployment, underemployment, disguised
unemployment, work participation, labour absorption; Wage rates: subsistence wage, minimum
wages act in India, empirical cases on wages, types of wage contracts, forms of, levels and trends of
agricultural wages; Gender gap in wages: male and female wages, levels and trends, disparity;
Labour-credit interlinkages: labour services and unfreedom in agriculture, bonded labour, attached
labour, poverty and agricultural labour; Welfare programmes: government wage employment and
self employment programmes, forms of market interventions in the labour market.
Texts/References:
1. K. Sharma Labour Economics, Anmol Publications Private Limited, 2006.
2. P. Lanjouw and N. Stern, Economic Development in Palanpur Over Five Decades, Oxford University
Press, 1998.
3. B. Agarwal, A field of One�s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia, Reprint, Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
4. V. K. Ramachandran, Wage Labour and Unfreedom in Agriculture, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990.
5. Consumer Expenditure and Employment Unemployment Round , Reports of the National Sample
Survey Organization, Quinquennial rounds, 2004-05
6. S. R. Osmani, �Wage Determination in Rural Labour Markets: The Theory of Implicit Cooperation�, in Journal of Development Economics, (34) 1-2, 1990, pp. 3-23.
