Occupational Distribution of Labour

The occupational (or sectoral) distribution of the workforce shows how the working population is spread across the three sectors of the economy — primary (agriculture and allied), secondary (industry) and tertiary (services). It is one of the clearest indicators of a region's stage of economic development: in a developing agrarian economy a large share of workers is in the primary sector; as development proceeds, that share falls and the secondary and tertiary shares rise.

Andhra Pradesh's pattern. The workforce of Andhra Pradesh is still heavily concentrated in the primary sector — a very large proportion of workers are engaged in agriculture and allied activities as cultivators (those who own or operate land) and agricultural labourers (those who work on others' land for wages). This dependence on agriculture for employment is markedly higher than the share of agriculture in the state's income, which is the crux of a structural problem discussed below.

Two features the syllabus highlights:

1. A high share of agricultural labourers. Within the farm workforce, the proportion of agricultural labourers in Andhra Pradesh has tended to be higher than the all-India proportion, while the share of cultivators has been correspondingly lower — reflecting land holdings that are unequal and often too small to sustain a family, pushing many rural workers into wage labour.
2. A gradual shift away from cultivation. Census data across 2001–2011 showed the number of cultivators falling and the number of agricultural labourers rising — part of a wider all-India trend of workers moving off their own land, and only slowly into non-farm work. …