The voices of the poor are generally muted and do not resonate in agricultural statistics and in decision making on policy because reliable and timely data are not available on the consequences of change on the rural poor. Decisions made based on incomplete information may be quantitatively accurate, but in terms of the dynamics of the changes, they may be fuzzy, anecdotal and fragmented.

An understanding of village-level information and ground realities can act as an important catalyst in accelerating development. It provides a working knowledge of the rural economy, which can accelerate the development of policies and programs for better livelihood and living standards in rural areas.

Reducing poverty is a dynamic process that is driven by individuals, families, firms and institutions within a changing technological, institutional and policy environment. The two empirical facts for measuring poverty are: (a) Most of the poor are rural and (b) They mainly live in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Without a deeper and more contextual understanding of what works, why and how it works at the individual, household and field levels, the capacity for improving pro-poor technological, institutional, and policy design is limited. To provide the most efficient way to understand farming systems in rural areas and identify the socio-economic constraints faced by the farming community in the semi-arid tropics (SAT), the ICRISAT Economics Program (now known as RP-MIP) initiated Village Level Studies (VLS) in 1975.

The VLS Data Bank.

Three mutually reinforcing considerations: (1) the nature of interdisciplinary research at ICRISAT, (2) the variability of agricultural production in the SAT, and (3) the potential for complementarities in data collection and analysis to address a range of research topics (Walker and Ryan 1990) led to the need to collect uniform data across a panel of households, management of longitudinal village studies and rapid rural appraisal techniques. The complementarity becomes most apparent when researchers through intensive longitudinal studies identify spatially wider researchable problems that can be best addressed with rapid rural appraisal techniques. By the same token, rapid rural appraisal techniques can be skillfully applied by researchers with perspective to address quite fundamental material issues over time and space, which will provide timely information for decision-making, mainly on issues concerning agricultural development projects (Walker and Ryan 1990; and Pingali et al. 1987).

References

• Pingali P, Bigot Y and Hans P Binswanger. 1987. Agricultural mechanization and the evolution of farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Walker TS and Ryan JG. 1990. Village and household economies in India’s semi arid tropics, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 394 pp.