Topics: Economics
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About 5% of the nexus population engages in types of work other than agriculture (0.6% of women, 9% of men). This includes 1% as manufacturers and processors in household industry (0.4% of women, 2% of men) and 1% as involved in trade and commerce (0.1% of women, 2% of men). Carpet-making had been on the rise in the past dozen years until falling foreign demand closed a number of local looms. Still, this business continues to employ, year-round, scores of men and boys throughout the nexus. The red sandstone quarried in Bihar since the age of the Mauryas continues to be cut out of nearby mountain faces and chiseled by hand into loose gravel or transportable blocks by workmen earning 25 rupees (U.S. 71¢) a day. The industrialization which entered western Bihar in the 1920s has found little obvious manifestation in the nexus. The only smokestacks to be seen are those rising above the temporary brick kilns established in surrounding areas. The production of biris employs the largest number of household workers. Men and women sit all day in or outside their homes rolling chopped tobacco into tobacco leaves. They earn 25 rupees for every thousand made (a vey hard day's production). The tobacco comes from state forests in the Kaimur Range where middlemen purchase harvest lots from the government, hire members of the scheduled tribes who dwell in the hills to harvest it, and then pay nexus residents to make the biris before selling them to distributors. Of course, most women who work in biri production or as agricultural laborers are responsible, as well, for the domestic work in their own homes of cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing. The wealthiest nexus residents may drive their children into the city with their own motorcycles, cars, and jeeps, combining the chore with urban shopping and entertainment. Beginning in the 1960s, the Green Revolution has significantly increased the profitability of cultivation (although the final cost, in terms of land exhaustion and environmental impact, has yet to be reckoned). Landowners, proportionately few among all residents, have invested much of their new capital in local businesses and used the returns to pay for expensive education and buy luxury items like jeeps. Their children acquire costly tastes over the course of their urban education and introduce a new consumerism back home in keeping with the rising conspicuous consumption which has followed the central government's plan of national economic liberalization of the 1990s. Many upper-class families in the nexus have bought or plan to buy a second home in Banaras. |