10. Withering Family Farms

Small and marginal farmers seem to be trapped in a precarious persistence between the city slums and empty villages. The study began by placing the precariousness of a smallholder family farm at the centre and considering various schools of thoughts on peasants, family farms and agriculturists, before using these terms interchangeably. This study steers away both from a rural productivity approach looking at the efficiency and scalability of smallholdings, as much as from an ethnographic narration of distress. It argues the need to find ways to sustain smallholders in an era of urbanisation. In that process, it illuminates why a socio-economic constituency with widespread presence and multiple nomenclature is invisible to the society. The motivation behind carrying out the study was the felt need to reverse an apparent invisibilisation of the smallholder constituency. In this effort, the study brings together the history of governance and agro-ecology, and the political-economic and socio-institutional angles associated with livelihood and distributional perspectives, using empirical observations from Karnataka State. Why, where and how of the study are detailed in the first five chapters of the book, before presenting the site-specific features of the urban–agrarian dynamics in Chaps. 6 –9. This final chapter synthesises and highlights the essence of all previous chapters, though not in any sequential order of study sites.