BR Ambedkar’s vision could hold solutions to India’s agrarian distress and unemployment

In the weeks leading up to India’s national election, thousands of farmers have been protesting the policies of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Among their demands, the farmers want minimum price guarantees for almost two dozen crops as climate change pushes them to diversify away from cultivating water-intensive rice and wheat.

With farmers describing the protest as a fight to save democracy itself, it is timely to reflect on the lifework of BR Ambedkar, the lead drafter of India’s Constitution – and not just because he foresaw risks to Indian democracy.

Ambedkar’s vision as a development economist was no less prescient and ought to be studied by anyone seeking solutions to the intersecting economic and climate crises facing India’s farmers, urban unemployed and poor.

As far back as in 1918, in a paper published in the Journal of Indian Economy, titled “Small holdings in India and their remedies”, Ambedkar had zeroed in on the problem of idle labour across India’s scattered, small farms and proposed industrialisation as “the soundest remedy for the agricultural problem of India”.

He argued that prioritising labour-intensive industrial activity would pull surplus farm labour into high-value manufacturing which, in turn, would generate capital for investment back into land whose economic efficiency depends on the right mix of...

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