Farming is the main activity in Palampur, and some other activities, such as small-scale manufacturing, dairy, transport, etc., are also carried out on a limited scale. These production activities need various types of resources — natural resources, manmade items, human effort, money, etc.
The Story of Village Palampur Class 9 Notes
Introduction
Palampur is connected with Raiganj and further connected with a small town, Shahpur. Raiganj is a big village and 3 km from Palampur. Many kinds of transport are visible on this road, starting from bullock carts, tongas, and bogeys (wooden carts drawn by buffaloes) loaded with jaggery (gur) and other commodities to motor vehicles like motorcycles, jeeps, tractors and trucks.
This village has about 450 families, along with 80 upper-caste families and own most of thewho land and live in brick houses.
- One third of the population are SC, meaning Dalit families live in small mud houses.
- Most of the houses have electricity, and this electricity is used for tubewells and small businesses.
- There are two primary schools and one high school.
- One government health centre and one private dispensary.
Organisation of Production
What Is Production?
Production means making goods and services that people need or want like food, clothes, transport or education. want,To produce anything, we required four things. These are called factors of production.
- Natural Resources: Natural resources are like land, water, forests and minerals. For example, a farmer needs land to grow crops and water to irrigate them.
- Labour: Labour are the people who do the work. Some jobs need skilled workers, and others need manual worker like farmers or factory workers.
- Physical Capital: There are two types of physical capital:workers (a) Fixed Capital: This is long-lasting tools and buildings like ploughs, tractors, sewing machines, computers, and factories. (b) Working Capital: These are the raw materials and money used during production. For example, clay for pottery, money to buy seeds, and yarn for weaving.
- Human Capital: This means skills, ideas and the ability to organise everything. For example, a shopkeeper who knows how to manage money and stock is using human capital.
For example, in a factory we required:
- Land the space where the factory is built.
- Labour is the workers operating machines.
- Fixed capital is the machines and building.
- Working capital is raw materials like cloth or metal.
- Human capital the manager who runs the factory.
Farming in Palampur
1. Land is fixed.
75 per cent of the people of Palampur are doing farming. Farming is a main production activity in Palampur. After 1960 some of the wasteland areas in the village were converted into cultivable land.
2. Is there a way one can grow more from the same land?
The farmers are able to grow three different crops in a year in Palampur due to the well-developed system of irrigation. Electricity came early to Palampur. Its major impact was to transform the system of irrigation. The first tubewells were installed by the government in Palampur; because of this, an entire cultivated area of 200 hectares was irrigated by this system.
All farmers in Palampur grow at least two main crops; many have been growing potato as the third crop in the past fifteen to twenty years. The farmer uses traditional seeds in farming, and these traditional seeds need less water. Farmers used cow dung and other natural manure as fertilisers.
The Green Revolution in the late 1960s introduced wheat and rice, which are high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of seeds. Compared to the traditional seeds, the HYV seeds promised to produce much greater amounts of grain on a single plant. As a result, the same piece of land would now produce far larger quantities of food grains than was possible earlier.
The high yields of wheat. In Palampur, the yield of wheat grown from the traditional varieties was 1300 kg per hectare. With HYV seeds, the yield went up to 3200 kg per hectare. There was a large increase in the production of wheat. Farmers now had greater amounts of surplus wheat to sell in the markets.
3. Will the land sustain?
Land is a natural resource, and it is important to be careful. Scientific reports say that the modern farming methods have overused the natural resource base. In many areas, the Green Revolution is associated with the loss of soil fertility due to increased use of chemical fertilisers. Also, continuous use of groundwater for tubewell irrigation has led to the depletion of the water table.
4. How is land distributed between the farmers of Palampur?
In Palampur, most people are engaged in agriculture. In Palampur, about one-third of the 450 families are landless, and 150 families are Dalits, and they have no land for cultivation. 240 families cultivate small plots.
of land less than 2 hectares in size. Cultivation of such plots doesn’t bring adequate income to the farmer family. In Palampur, there are 60 families of medium and large farmers who cultivate more than 2 hectares of land. A few of the large farmers have land extending over 10 hectares or more.
5. Who will provide the labour?
Medium and large farmers hire farm labourers to work on their fields. Farm labourers come either from landless families or families cultivating small plots of land. Unlike farmers, farm labourers do not have a right over the crops grown on the land. Dala is a landless farm labourer who works on daily wages in Palampur. The minimum wage for a farm labourer set by the government is Rs 300 per day (March 2019), but Dala gets only Rs 160.
6. The capital needed in farming
Most small farmers have to borrow money to arrange for the capital. They borrow from large farmers or the village moneylenders or the traders who supply various inputs for cultivation. The rate of interest on such loans is very high. In contrast to the small farmers, the medium and large farmers have their own savings from farming. They are thus able to arrange for the capital needed.
7. Sale of Surplus Farm Products
Farmers have produced wheat on their lands using the three factors of production. The wheat is harvested, and production is complete. What do the farmers do with the wheat? They retain a part of the wheat for the family’s consumption and sell the surplus wheat.
Non-Farm Activities in Palampur
Only 25 per cent of the people working in Palampur are engaged in activities other than agriculture.
1. Dairy — the other common activity
Dairy is a common activity in many families of Palampur. People feed their buffalo on various kinds of grass and the jowar and bajra that grow during the rainy season. The milk is sold in Raiganj, the nearby large village.
2. An example of small-scale manufacturing in Palampur
At present, less than fifty people are engaged in manufacturing in Palampur. Unlike the manufacturing that takes place in the big factories in the towns and cities, manufacturing in Palampur involves very simple production methods and is done on a small scale.
3. The shopkeepers of Palampur
People involved in trade (exchange of goods) are not many in Palampur. The traders of Palampur are shopkeepers who buy various goods from wholesale markets in the cities and sell them in the village. You will see small general stores in the village selling a wide range of items like rice, wheat, sugar, tea, oil, biscuits, soap, toothpaste, batteries, candles, notebooks, pens, pencils, and even some cloth.
4. Transport: a fast-developing sector
There are a variety of vehicles on the road connecting Palampur to Raiganj. Rickshawallahs, tongawallahs, jeep, tractor and truck drivers and people driving the traditional bullock cart and bogey are people in the transport services. They ferry people and goods from one place to another and in return get paid for it. The number of people involved in transport has grown over the last several years.
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