Rural Sociology S.L.Doshi,P.C.Jain

The Indian society has a euphoria for village life. The village society is considered to be an old society which has a rich culture. Village peo ple are said to be honest and hard working. Their robust commonsense is very rich. This society is in the process of new social formations. There came a watershed when the country decided to launch with development programmes to lead the villagers to the road of progress. Millions of money has been spent on the development of villages. What we want to do with the villages is that we want to make them self-sufficient and also link them with the wider society at re-gional and national levels.

The Constitution of India gives certain provisions to the villagers in the form of special development programmes. The village poverty has to be eradicated. There needs to be an end of the exploitation of villagers. Our national leaders throughout the struggle of inde pendence reiterated that in independent India, first priority would be given to the village development. By village development we under-stand development of agriculture, irrigation, health, education, cooperatives and panchayat system. What is required is to empower the people so that they can make their own decisions. In real sense, the development is that, which the villagers term development. De-spite the diversification of village economy from subsistence level to market, the villagers continue to practise agriculture as their main source of livelihood. The age-old agriculture has now become capital-istic and the village capitalism has multiplying effect. The land tenure system, land control, and above all land relations occupy an important place in rural society. Not only the village economy has witnessed tre mendous transformation, there has also been vital cultural transformation.

Thousands of social workers, change agents, government agencies and NGOs, are working in our more than five lakh villages. The lages are at crossroads. On the one hand they want to maintain their identity and on the other hand they want to establish link or nexus with the urban society. It should be mentioned that both rural and ur ban communities, though distinct, are parts of a wider Indian civilisation.

In our enthusiasm for leading the villages towards development, we should be intelligent enough to understand thoroughly, the rural society. Sociologists have spent thousands of days in the study of rural society. Surely, there is no well-tested all-embracing theory for rural development but with so much of accumulated rural empirical data, sociologists and for that matter rural sociologists have made certain empirical generalisations. These generalisations are found in concepts like sanskritisation, westernisation and dominant caste. Those work ing in the rural society must benefit from such conceptual constructions. The sociologists have also analysed the social forma-tions which have taken place in the rural society followed by development programmes.

We admit that those who work in the field or want to familiarise themselves with the village situations should not be guided by the rule of thumb. Conjectures and wild guesses hardly help us to get favour-able response from the villages. Our emphasis is that before launching a village development programme we should have an appropriate un-derstanding of the rural society. The present work is a sincere effort to look at the village life from the objective point of view. We present some of the important findings in the form of conceptual framework and analysis which can be useful for students of rural society. The book as we have prepared is thus a guide to those who are concerned with the development of our villages

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