REGIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY NOVEMBER 18, 2017 vol liI no 46 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 78 Regional Economies and Small Farmers in Karnataka Seema Purushothaman, Sheetal Patil Seema Purushothaman (seema.purushothaman@apu.edu.in) teaches at and Sheetal Patil (sheetal.patil@azimpremjifoundation.org) is a researcher at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. The divergence between economic growth and equality in the Indian context can be attributed to the disconnect between the macroeconomy and regional rural economies that host small landholdings. Comparing the agrarian peripheries of two distinct capital-accumulating urban areas in Karnataka, a decipherable pattern in distributional outcomes, food and livelihood security as well as sustainability are revealed. The portrayal of capital-centric urbanisation as an opportunity for livelihoods and poverty reduction among India’s agrarian communities is questioned. F ew geographies and communities in today’s world remain exclusively rural or urban. Rural social customs and food culture are commonly found in urban life. Rural life is replete with capital-driven technologies and urban “externalities” in all their forms. The coexistence of urbanism and rurality in hybrid lifestyles reflect both the contradictions and seamlessness of social evolution. This said, although rural–urban socio-economic boundaries are blurring, rurality continues to prevail in India in diverse forms. This paper ad- dresses the trade-offs and challenges involved in adopting a regional development model built on rural agrarian enterprise when urbanism is pervasive, using the case of Mandya and Bengaluru as an anchor. The rural is generally caricatured as money-poor and nature-rich, but a historical analysis suggests otherwise. Rural surpluses fuelling market-centric towns around agricultural hubs can be traced to the mercantile economy of irrigated paddy lands in Tamil Nadu (Harriss-White 2013), to the agro- industrial regions of North Bihar (Misra 2007), the North East Americas (Clark 1990) or Thailand (Andriesse 2014). They indicate that capitalism and urbanisation are often built around rural enterprise. Harriss-White (2012) addresses the question of why local capitalism in agrarian regions needs careful academic treatment. From the second half of 20th century onwards, after a brief spell of economic success during the green revolution, materi- al prosperity in agrarian India has been an exception rather than the norm. Despite a growing economy, agricultural trade, and technology, India’s agricultural performance in general, and the welfare of the large constituency of smallholder agri- culturists, has been poor. This noted, a development model based on generating capital in the rural primary sector is im- portant in India for many reasons: the large number of people dependent directly or indirectly on agriculture, the persisting dominance of rural smallholders, the extent of land under diverse farming systems and the role this sector plays in the well-being and sustainability of a highly populated nation. In this paper we take a closer look at the widening rural– urban divide from the perspective of the agrarian community, the now dominant rural people 1 using the cases of Mandya and peri-urban Bengaluru. We examine how rural communi- ties and geographies are being used for capital accumulation in the urban core of a growing economy. We then examine different paths of urbanisation along with impacts on their peripheral geographies and communities.