Vol. 8, Issue 6, Part B (2022)

Abstract
Agricultural labourers are socially and economically poorest section of the society. Agricultural labourer households constitute the historically deprived social groups, displaced handicraftsmen and dispossessed peasantry. They are the poorest of the poor in rural India. Their growth reflects the colonial legacy of under development and the inadequacies of planning intervention in the past. Overcrowding and growth of agricultural labourer continued unabated, given poor labour absorption in the non- agricultural sector and also inadequacies of reforms in the agrarian structure. The poverty syndrome among agricultural labourers needs to be read against such a background of prolonged rural under development, assetlessness, unemployment, low wages, under-nutrition, illiteracy and social backwardness constitute the poverty syndrome among agricultural labourers. These reinforce each other so as to constitute a vicious circle of poverty. There is little inter-generational upward mobility among agricultural labourer households. Human factor is of supreme importance in any pattern of economic development. More so are the agricultural labourers of India, the country's largest unorganized section comprising the poorest workers, toiling on the sunny fields of India. Most of them hail from the socially disadvantaged sections of our society and a large number of them continue to live under the poverty condition.