Coping with Risk or Courting More Risk?report on changing rural livelihoods during agrarian distress in Kerala

This paper deals with the agrarian distress experienced in parts of rural Kerala from the latter half of the 1990s, and the ways in which the distress affected the livelihoods of cultivating households. In particular, the paper discusses the reasons for the agrarian distress, its impact on different socio-economic groups of the rural population and the livelihood strategies that these different household groups adopted during the distress. Two questions are posed. How did cultivating households cope with the agrarian distress? Did the attempted coping strategies reduce risk and vulnerability in the livelihood systems of cultivating households?1 The data used in the paper were collected as part of a larger research project on rural livelihoods in Kerala.