Analysing Livelihood Strategies of Landless Manual Labour Households in Rural Bihar: A Study of a North Bihar Village

The paper studies the livelihood strategies of Landless Manual Labour (LML) households of a village named Katkuian, located in the West Champaran district of North Bihar. The Foundation of Agrarian Studies surveyed the village as part of the Project on Agrarian Relations in India. LML households, despite engaging in various occupations, predominantly hinged their sustenance through manual labour (in and around the village), seasonal work migration and tenant cultivation. The paper has designed a Livelihood Strategy Choice Model to understand the factors that drive certain households towards more income-generating livelihood strategies while limiting others. The insights from this model indicate that the indebtedness status of the household and male labour endowment substantially influenced the decisions pertaining to household migration. The decisions about household cultivation heavily relied on female labour endowment. The composition of male labourers in a household spanning across diverse age groups emerges as a key determinant in the choice between different livelihood strategies.