Agricultural labourers are those persons who work on the land of others on wages for the major part of the year and earn a major portion of their income as a payment in the form of wages for works performed on the agricultural farms owned by others.
The first Agricultural Labour Enquiry Committee of 1950-51 regarded those workers as agricultural workers who normally worked for 50 per cent of more days on the payment of wages.
The second Agricultural Labour Enquiry Committee, 1956-57 accepted a broad view and included all those workers into agricultural labourers who were badly engaged in agriculture and allied activities like animal husbandry, dairy, piggery, poultry farming etc.
This first committee again classified the agricultural workers into two different categories such as:
(a) attached labourers are those workers who are attached to some other farmer households on the basis of a written or oral agreement.
These attached workers are working as per the wishes of their masters and are not free to work at any other place. They are working both in the house and farms of their masters. Thus, these attached labourers are working as serfs or servants and they are also known as bonded labourers.
(b) On the other hand, casual labourers are those workers who are free to work in any farm on the payment of daily wages.
In India these casual labourers include:
(a) small farmers having a very small size of holdings who devote most of their time working on the farm of others;
(b) landless labourers who exclusively work for others;
(c) tenants who work on leased land but work most of the time on the land of others;
(d) sharecroppers who also work as agricultural labourers.
