Table 3.4 Occupation-wise Distribution of Employed Persons in Ramankari Village Occupation No. of Persons Percent age Farmer 109 8.26 Agricultural labour 399 30.25 Casual labour 157 11.90 Business and trade 84 6.37 Regular private service 257 19.48 Regular govt.service 100 7.58 Inland fishing 34 2.58 Self employment 179 13.57 Total 1319 100.00 3.1.5 Distribution of owned land area Even though the Kerala Land Reforms Act of 1964 made the then landless hutment dwellers allover the state owners of their huts and small plots of land around them, the present survey shows that still a small percentage (0.67 percent) of the households in Ramankari village do not have their own houses or any land property. In recent years many of the local households who used to live in small thatched huts were able to rebuild or modify their houses with tiled roof making use of subsidies and housing loans provided to them under the various schemes of the state government and local bodies. At present 83.07 percent of the houses in the study area are tiled and another 7.73 percent are concrete buildings. The remaining 9.2 percent of the houses remains as thatched huts. As mentioned above, more than 99 percent of the households in the study area are owners of dry lands. Average size of their dry lands is estimated ascents. Wide disparities are observed in the distribution of dry landholdings among the households. While the top 9 percent of them have 50 or more cents of dry land area, the area owned by the bottom 48 percent are less than 10 cents. Even though nearly three-fourths of the total area in Ramankari village is wetlands, about two-thirds of the local households do not own any wetlands. Average size of wetland holdings of the remaining households is estimated ascents. Distribution of village households on the basis of their owned land area is given in table 3.5 which shows the extent of the prevailing inequality in the distribution of landholdings. It is observed that, while the bottom 40 percent of the
households in the study area are either landless or own less than ten cents of land, the owned land area of the top 24.27 percent amounts to one or more acres.
