Rural livelihoods in the farm ecology of an economically backward district of West Bengal, India

Participatory Rural Livelihood Analysis paves a discernible way of socio-economic analysis for development planning. Purulia, by becoming a typical economically backward district and a complex-diverse-risk prone farm economy in India, is reeling under abject poverty and geospatial migration of farm labourers. This sector is now suffering from declining growth, uncertain market, low capital formation, and vagaries of nature. The sustainable livelihood has become the universal goals since millennium declaration by UNO. The present paper examines the achievability of sustainable livelihood in terms of selected variables prevalent in and integral to a farming system. The sustainable livelihood has become a complex disposition of some intrinsic factors viz. wage, calorie intake value, food intake value, level of drudgery, seasonality of wage, gender dimension of wages, security perception of livelihood, and its spatial distribution along the slope of economic affiliation. It has been found that some variables like size of holding, cropping intensity; irrigation status, migration, motivation, and education are being relegated to the issues of livelihood generation. The predominant factors like income, crop yield, technology adoption have some times been subsided by factors like wage pattern, family size, cropping intensity, intercropping space etc to live behind a basket of alternative thinking that only economic interventions or package of practices can’t assure sustainable livelihood. We have to go beyond by refocusing our retention on some set of soft variables that are interactively characterizing the prospect of livelihood generation.