Breaking down the question
The question links two distinct sociological objects: globalization as a macro process and the agrarian class structure as a concrete social formation. The verb explain asks you to establish causal and relational connections — how the forces unleashed by liberalisation since 1991 have reshaped who owns, works and profits from land in rural India.
Two keywords deserve attention. Implications suggests the theoretical or structural consequences — the logic of change. Impact points to the observable, empirical outcomes on the ground. A complete answer addresses both registers, moving from the mechanisms of globalization to their measurable effects on peasants, farmers and agrarian labour.
The phrase situating the changing agrarian class structure signals that class structure is not static. You must first sketch the classical picture of agrarian classes and then show how globalization has rearranged it — creating new winners, deepening old vulnerabilities and blurring some inherited categories.
How to approach it
Begin with a working model of agrarian class structure. Daniel Thorner's schema of maliks, kisans and mazdoors — those who live off rent, those who cultivate, and those who labour — offers a durable starting point. You can then note how the Green Revolution had already generated a class of capitalist farmers before globalization intensified.
Next, identify the specific channels through which globalization operates on agriculture: trade liberalisation and exposure to world prices, the withdrawal of state support and subsidies, the entry of agribusiness and contract farming, the penetration of corporate retail, and the commodification of inputs such as seeds. Each channel has a differential class effect.
Then trace the impact class by class. Large and capitalist farmers with capital and market access have often gained from export opportunities and high-value crops. Small and marginal farmers, squeezed by rising input costs and volatile output prices, face indebtedness and distress. Agrarian labourers experience casualisation and migration. A rigorous answer captures this differentiation rather than treating the peasantry as a single bloc.
Draw on Utsa Patnaik on the agrarian crisis and Jan Breman on informal and footloose labour. Conclude by weighing whether globalization has produced upward mobility or deepened polarisation. For further grounding, see our note on agrarian class structure.
Model answer
The agrarian class structure of India has never been static, but the era of globalization inaugurated by the economic reforms of 1991 has transformed it with unusual speed and intensity. To situate this change, one must first recover a baseline and then trace how the forces of liberalisation, trade integration and corporate penetration have redistributed advantage across rural classes.
The classical understanding of agrarian classes owes much to Daniel Thorner, whose distinction between maliks who draw income from property, kisans who cultivate with family labour, and mazdoors who survive by selling their labour, mapped the fundamental relations of land. The Green Revolution of the late 1960s had already unsettled this order by fostering a class of prosperous capitalist farmers, particularly in the north-western states, who accumulated surplus, invested in mechanisation and increasingly hired wage labour. Globalization built upon and radicalised this trajectory.
The implications of globalization for agrarian class structure flow through several channels. First, trade liberalisation exposed Indian agriculture to world price fluctuations, subjecting cultivators to a volatility over which they had little control. Second, the state retreated from its earlier protective role, reducing subsidies, weakening public procurement in many crops and diminishing institutional credit, which pushed cultivators towards private moneylenders. Third, agribusiness corporations entered the countryside through contract farming, corporate retail and the supply of commodified inputs, especially proprietary and hybrid seeds. Fourth, the shift towards high-value and export-oriented cash crops rewarded those with capital while heightening the risk borne by the resource-poor.
The impact of these processes has been sharply differentiated across classes. Large and capitalist farmers, endowed with land, capital and market linkages, have frequently benefited. They could diversify into horticulture, floriculture and export commodities, negotiate contracts with agribusiness firms, and absorb the shocks of price volatility. For this stratum, globalization opened avenues of accumulation and consolidated their dominance in rural markets and local politics.
Small and marginal farmers, who constitute the overwhelming majority of Indian cultivators, have borne the brunt of the adverse effects. Caught between rising costs of privatised inputs and unstable, often falling, output prices, they slid into cycles of indebtedness. Utsa Patnaik has argued that the withdrawal of state support and the deflationary pressures of neoliberal policy produced a systemic agrarian crisis, manifest tragically in the epidemic of farmer suicides across several states. For this class, globalization signified not opportunity but heightened precarity and the erosion of viable cultivation.
At the base of the structure, agrarian labourers have experienced the casualisation and informalisation of work. As Jan Breman has documented, rural labour has become increasingly footloose, migrating between agriculture and non-farm work in construction, brick kilns and urban informal sectors. Mechanisation reduced demand for field labour in some regions, while the collapse of small-farm viability pushed many former cultivators into the ranks of wage labourers, a process of depeasantisation.
Globalization has also blurred and complicated inherited class categories. The growth of non-farm rural incomes, remittances and pluri-active households means that many rural families now straddle multiple class positions. Some marginal farmers derive most of their income from off-farm work, while some traditional labourers have acquired small plots. Yet this fluidity has not dissolved the underlying polarisation; if anything, it has widened the gap between an accumulating agrarian elite and a swelling mass of distressed cultivators and casual labourers.
In situating the changing agrarian class structure, one must therefore resist two simplifications. It is inaccurate to portray globalization as a uniform benefactor lifting all rural boats, and equally misleading to depict the peasantry as a homogeneous victim. The reality is one of agrarian differentiation, in which the same macro forces that enriched a capitalist farming class impoverished the small cultivator and casualised the labourer.
In conclusion, globalization has not created the agrarian class structure but has profoundly reshaped it, intensifying commercialisation, sharpening class polarisation and integrating rural India into circuits of global capital on deeply unequal terms. The central sociological lesson is that the impact of globalization on agrarian classes is mediated by prior endowments of land, capital and social power — and that, absent countervailing state action, market integration tends to reproduce and deepen existing inequalities rather than dissolve them.
Examiner's perspective
Examiners look for candidates who can move beyond a generic account of globalization to a class-differentiated analysis of Indian agriculture. The best answers open with a clear model of agrarian classes — Thorner remains an efficient anchor — and then trace how liberalisation affects each stratum distinctly.
Weak scripts treat the peasantry as an undifferentiated whole or reduce the answer to a list of problems such as farmer suicides without situating them within class dynamics. Naming thinkers such as Utsa Patnaik and Jan Breman, and deploying concepts like depeasantisation and casualisation, signals conceptual command. The strongest conclusions stress differentiation and polarisation, showing that outcomes depend on the unequal distribution of land and capital that cultivators bring to the encounter with global markets.