Breaking down the question
This is a directive question — do you agree — which requires you to take a clear position and defend it with evidence. The safest and most defensible stance is a qualified yes: the agrarian class structure is changing, though unevenly and without erasing older hierarchies. The phrase justify with illustrations is a firm instruction to ground every claim in concrete examples, not abstractions.
The keyword is agrarian class structure, so you must first establish what that structure was — the classical categories of landlords, owner-cultivators, tenants and landless labourers — before demonstrating movement within it.
How to approach it
Begin with a baseline model of the traditional agrarian structure, drawing on Daniel Thorner's classification of maliks, kisans and mazdoors. Then present the drivers of change: land reforms, the Green Revolution, commercialisation, and the entry of capital into agriculture.
Organise the body around specific transformations, each with an illustration: the rise of a class of capitalist farmers, the decline of intermediary tenures, depeasantisation and the growth of a rural labour force, and reverse tenancy. Conclude with the qualifier that change is regionally uneven and that caste continues to overlap with class.
Model answer
The agrarian class structure in India is indeed changing, though the transformation is uneven and incomplete. To assess this, one must begin with the classical structure described by Daniel Thorner, who classified the rural population into maliks (landlords living off rent), kisans (working peasants) and mazdoors (landless labourers). This structure was reinforced by colonial revenue systems such as the zamindari settlement.
Several forces have reshaped this order. The abolition of intermediary tenures after independence removed many absentee landlords, at least formally, and strengthened the position of erstwhile tenant cultivators who acquired occupancy rights. The Green Revolution of the late 1960s then introduced high-yielding varieties, irrigation and mechanisation, which rewarded farmers with capital and secure land.
A visible outcome has been the rise of a class of prosperous capitalist farmers — the bullock capitalists identified by scholars in western India — who produce for the market, hire wage labour and invest surpluses. Punjab, Haryana and coastal Andhra offer clear illustrations of this ascent of middle and rich peasant proprietors.
Simultaneously, the base of the structure has widened through depeasantisation. Small and marginal cultivators, unable to bear rising input costs, have increasingly become wage labourers, producing a growing rural proletariat. The phenomenon of reverse tenancy — where large farmers lease in land from smallholders — further signals the penetration of capitalist relations.
Yet the change is qualified. In eastern and central India, semi-feudal relations persist, and caste continues to overlap heavily with class, so that landless labourers remain disproportionately from Dalit and Adivasi communities. Beteille's studies show that ritual, economic and political dimensions have grown less congruent, but hierarchy endures.
One may therefore agree that the agrarian class structure is changing — moving towards more capitalist and differentiated forms — while recognising that the pace and depth of this change vary sharply across regions.
For further reading, see agrarian class structure.
Examiner's perspective
A top answer commits to a position in the opening sentence and sustains it. Examiners look for named illustrations — Punjab, coastal Andhra, reverse tenancy — rather than generic assertions of change. Citing Thorner for the baseline and Beteille or Patnaik for interpretation demonstrates conceptual command. The concluding qualification about regional unevenness and the caste-class overlap protects the answer from appearing one-sided.