ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the available data on agricultural growth and employment for Punjab and Haryana. It presents an overview of trends in population and the size of various components of the rural labor force, assesses the course of real wages and incomes of agricultural laborers, and attempt to make sense of the fragmentary information on the causes of rapid growth in the agricultural wage labor force. The chapter also assesses the degree to which the pattern of employment growth matches the rapid increase in non-foodgrain employment suggested by John Mellor's version of the two-sector growth model and the extent to which the rural economy in Punjab-Haryana is approaching the "full employment" point at which real wages begin to increase on a sustained basis. In terms of level of technology, employment increases with the use of mechanical pumping and with mechanical threshing, indicating that the "expansion" effects of the technology outweigh the labor displacement effects.
