Impact of Sand-bar Movements on Livelihood and Income in River Aie in Assam, India

Abstract

Showcasing the complexity of understanding interdisciplinarity the study dwells into the learnings from spatial science and from the agrarian change and rural development domain which suggests that in rural economies people are dependent on various livelihood strategies and there is a tendency of formation of class differentiation which include the rich, middle and poor peasants but the assumption was that with the start of capitalism these middle peasants would disappear, which didn’t take place. The hypothesis of the present work is to see whether the land under sandbar is dynamic and to understand whether socio-economy in sandbar is affected by this dynamicity of land, and to document practices which are particularly suitable for sandbars in the region. The study is based on GIS in order to track and map the morphological dynamics of the river and understand the livelihood practices that are present in and around these lands in the rural sandbars. These middle peasants also fall under the category of the poor often. These rural poor continued to be landowners of small landholdings. Based on these classifications these group falls under both wage laborers as well as petty commodity producers who has some amount of land but use family labor thus, meaning the livelihoods are actually a complex combination of both the wage labors and the self-employment.