7 important Profile of the rural community

7 important Profile of the rural community

 Content 

  1. An introduction
  2. Meaning of Rural Community
  3. Rural and Urban distinction
  4. Profile of the Rural Community 
    1. Rural Housing Pattern
    2. Size of the village
    3. Rural Structure 
    4. Caste System 
    5. Inter-Caste Relationship
    6. Family and Kinship Relationship
    7. The political and economic connection

An Introduction

The popular saying that India is a country that lives in its villages is true. Rural communities are the backbone of India. Tranquility, peace, and a beautiful relationship with nature are some of the things that people talk about when they talk about village life. In India, there is a lot more to learn about the people who live in the countryside. People in village communities don't live in the same way all over the world or in the same way all over the world. This is because village communities aren't always the same. It's also true that each village is affected by a number of things, such as what happens in the natural world, what happens in the cultural world, what happens in the political or economic world, and what happens in the political world.

It's easier to understand a rural society if you look at things like the size of the population, the physical structure of the community, and the way they live their lives. Another thing to look at is how the village's economic and political policies affect their lives. This is important for any kind of real social work help. In social work, interventions for the village community have as much to do with their economic situation as with their political situation and how much power they have and where they live. As much as their differences are important, some common elements can be seen as the most important parts of rural living.

These things, as well as the presence of institutions and how easy they are to get to, are also important to social work interventions. The same way we use sociology, economics, and public administration to learn about rural communities, we do the same thing for cities. In the same way, when we think about interventions, we use ideas from social work methods. One of the most common ways people use is called community organisation, and it's the most common one.

They all look about the same when it comes to certain broad social and economic characteristics. The technological and organisational aspects are also easier to deal with in rural areas than in cities, and the socialisation processes are also well thought out. Within the village, there are groups of people who live together in groups that clearly separate different social groups. This can be seen in the rules and taboos that are put on rituals and customs and how people interact with each other. There are people who live in a village or a caste. The relationships are informal and face-to-face interactions are given the most importance, with personal and kinship intimacy being the most important.

Meaning of Rural Community 

Rural areas are home to rural communities. According to the census, rural areas see the village as the main place where people live. A village is usually thought of as the smallest place where people live. Most of the time, it follows the boundaries of a revenue village that is recognised by the local government. The revenue village doesn't have to be made up of all the homes. It could be a big village or a group of very small villages. It has a clear boundary and a clear name. That's not the case with the revenue village. It has a set boundary and each village is a separate administrative unit with its own village accounts. It could have one or more hamlets. It could also have a lot of them. The whole revenue village is one thing. There may be unsurveyed villages in forests or other places where the boundaries of each habitation area are kept by the people who live there, like a forest ranger.
The other meaning has to do with how people make money. Rural, then, refers to people who live in places where farming and nature play a big part in their lives. It would also talk about the size and type of technology used in rural areas. That's why in rural areas the technology used is very simple, with production levels high enough to meet one's family's needs and a little extra that could be sold in nearby stores.

Rural and Urban Distinction

Some states have the rural-urban distinction, but not all of them do. It's hard to tell the difference between a village and a town in some places, like Kerala. Instead, there is a line. The left end of the continuum is made up of rural people, and the right is made up of people who live in cities. They are in the middle. Urbanization is the process of moving from a rural area to a city. There isn't a perfect model of rural or urban, but rural areas are becoming more and more urban. Villages and cities used to be very different, but now there are fewer differences because of the rapid growth of cities thanks to industries, urban traits, and facilities. There are some sociologists who think of rural and urban as two separate things. They look at things like occupational differences, environmental differences, community sizes, density of population, social mobility and migration, social stratification, and the systems of social interaction. A third way to think about rural and urban communities is that both the village and the city are part of the same civilization, so there is no need for a rural-urban dichotomy or a continuum. 

People who study sociology have used the term "rural-urban continuum" to emphasise the idea that there aren't any sharp break points in the level or amount of rural and urban differences. Both villages and towns were part of the same culture in pre-British India, says M.S. Rao. The people in both places lived by the rules of kinship and caste. The social and cultural life of towns and cities was very different from the life of the villages. However, there were a few specific institutional forms and organisational ways that set them apart. In this way, one can think about how urbanised a community is as a good way to think about rural-urban relations. Factors that make a community rural or urban include occupation, population size and density, mobility, differentiation, and stratification.
Even though rural and urban aren't very different conceptually, every village has some things from the city, and every city has some things from the village.

Profile of the Rural Community 

People live in what is called "villages." Villages in India have a wide range of natural resources, population density, demographic features, amenities, connectivity, historicity, and a wide range of lifestyles, languages, cultural features, and their proximity to cities and other towns and cities. Some villages have a very old population because most of the younger people move away to find work. Gray villages are the name of villages like this one. Some of the villages are also empty. There are also other villages that are called fringe villages. These villages are on the outskirts of the towns and become part of the whole city. There are many examples of this in the cities, like the Nayabans in Noida, Harola, and so on, which are all surrounded by the planned city of Noida in the southeast of Delhi.

A village can have a wide range of social and occupational groups, such as farmers, artisans, craftsmen, and other groups. All of these groups depend in some way or another on farming. One of the most important things we learned was that communities that are both non-tribal and tribal tend to live in rural places. People who belong to the first group are called peasant societies or communities that have a strong connection to the nearby market towns. People who live in these communities aren't isolated like people who live in tribes. They are also linked to the nearby towns through some forms of shared governance that connect them to other people in the region. They also have a good relationship with people in the nearby town, who can buy and sell extra agricultural goods and useful things for daily life.
Villages are mostly food-producing units, and they are based on farming. They not only make things for themselves, but also for the cities, which don't make anything. People who live in rural areas use land and natural resources as their main source of income. Ecological conditions play a role in how long they stay, with hamlets that are close together or individual homes surrounded by their own fields.

1-Rural Housing Pattern

Everywhere you go in the country, there are different types of towns. In some places, the fields of the village are close to a group of houses. Outlying hamlets or several satellite villages are also found near some villages in this case. Second, there were a lot of places where people lived in a straight line, like in Kerala and the Konkan, or in the delta land of Bengal. In these places, each house is surrounded by its own private area. However, there isn't much to show where one village ends and another starts. In this area, there are a lot of scattered homesteads or groups of two or three homes.

As in this case, the physical boundaries of villages aren't clear in this case as well They are found in hill areas, in the Himalayan foothills, in the high lands of Gujarat, and in the Satpura range of Maharashtra, which is in the state of Gujarat. Usually, a village is thought of as a physical thing that has houses of mixed architecture (some made of mud and thatch and some made of cement) in the middle of fields of farming. There are, of course, some exceptions to the general picture of a small town. As in the case of Kerala, a village can have more than ten thousand people in it. Or, the village could be made up of a group of concrete homes where people live who work in service or are self-employed non-agriculturalists, as in the case of a number of villages near towns and cities in Himachal Pradesh.

2-Size of the Villages

This is how many people lived in villages in the country in 1981. There were 4689 towns and 5, 80,781 villages in 1991. This number grew by a lot. 5161 towns and 6,38,365 villages, including villages that aren't being used, were counted in the 2001 census. 72 percent of the population lives in villages. Another thing about rural life is that it has a lot of direct contact between people and nature. This includes the land, animal, and plant life. Agriculture is their main job. Agriculture is the source of income for about 58% of the labour force.

3-Rural Social Structure

There are four main parts of the rural social structure: village, community, family, and caste. Rural people live in all areas of life, from social to economic to political, and from culture to art. They show how different social norms and values, statuses and rules, rights and responsibilities, and so on can be. These are long-lasting rural social institutions that have been around for a long time and have very old historical roots and structures.
Rural social structure refers to how the different parts of the rural society work together, connect, and depend on each other. The caste system is a unique social structure, and the way the different units (castes) work together makes up the structure of rural society. Society, caste, and the Panchayat all have power over each person.

4-Caste System

In the Indian village, caste is the basic principle of how people work together. A big part of Hinduism's structure is the caste system.Another way to look at Caste is to think of it as a "monopolistic guild." The job that a caste has the right to do may be very simple. A village is thought of as a group of castes, each of which has been linked to a job in the past. More than one village is home to people in the caste. Members of a caste have marriage relationships with people in the nearby villages.

Sometimes, the castes are named after the jobs they do, like eli, dholi, chakali, Kammari, and so on. In most cases, people in the caste marry people in their own caste, but not in their own village. There are two types of people in the village: people who live there and people who live in the caste. If you want to move up the social ladder, you can get married to people who are from lower castes. This allows lower-caste women to move up in the social ladder. This is called hypergamy, and it is when people have a lot of sex (anuloma). For politics, social control, and marriage, the members of a village's caste group rely on their caste group in other villages, which are in other villages. Society, caste, and the Panchayat all have power over each person.All jobs that belong to a certain class are not found in the village. A village has some castes, but it may also need help from people from other nearby villages. With high class and high castes usually going together, this is how it works:

5-Inter-Caster-Relationship

Inter-caste relationships at the village level are called "vertical ties." People from different castes live together in a village because of their jobs. Peasant castes are usually the most common in villages. To do agricultural work, they need help from carpenter, blacksmith, and leather worker castes. There is a good chance that not all of the different castes live in the same village, so they rely on other villages for certain services, skills, and goods.
There is a system called the Jajmani System that helps people from different castes get along with each other. Jajmani is a kind of reciprocal relationship in which one family has the right to give goods and do things for the other.

6-Family and Kinship Relations

The rural family is the unit of economic, cultural, religious, and political activity in the area. In agricultural societies, the family is the unit that makes, distributes, and consumes goods and services. When a family makes a decision about marriage, the decision is made by the rules of kinship. The family has a lot of power and control over each person. Rural India has both a nuclear and a joint family, as well as a lot of different types of them. There are a lot of differences between regions and the types of families that live there. With changes in the social and economic situation in rural India, families are now different than they were a few years ago. In the past, the family was a place where things were made and sold. Now, it is more of a place where things are bought. The rules of marriage in India are different in the South and the North, and they aren't the same.

7-Political and Economic Connections

Cities have more political power than smaller towns. People have a lot of disagreements about land, traditional power arrangements, sharing common resources like community pastures, water, and forest resources, and crossing caste lines. Panchayats are usually the places where disagreements are settled. You can choose from two types: the Village Panchayat, and the Jati Panchayat. The first part is about the well-being of the families in that village, and the second part is about the village as a whole. This includes things like performing rituals for the good of the whole village or organizing programs for the good of the whole village, like building tanks, roads, and granaries. Panch, which means "five," is a traditional caste council in India. It is made up of a small number of people, but always an odd number. It deals with issues about caste and inter-caste relations. A certain caste is dominant, which means that it has more people, has more money, has more power, or has a lot of ritual statuses. It could also mean that they were the first to take advantage of the Western Education system.

Lower castes are often made to feel like they aren't important. Violence has often been used by the dominant castes to keep other castes in line. The power of the Panchayat is being diluted by the presence of secular formal institutions, and by the most powerful castes in the country. Caste Panchayats and Gram Panchayats are also at odds with each other. A class has an economic dimension to it. Upper castes are people who own land, and lower castes are people who don't own land.The power relations are also closely linked to the gendered place one is in. At the household level and in the community as well, rural women don't seem to have a lot of power in making decisions. They don't seem to be able to talk about their needs and concerns very well. It's also a lot less common for them to go to school or work than for men. These things get worse when class and caste are mixed together.

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