Commuting to/from work in crowded public transport is very exhausting. That saps your energy. I ought to have mentioned other aspects of a factory worker life: a) shift system (some plants work 2 or 3 shifts a day) which upsets work/leisure/sleep rythm, b) overtime depending on the peak demand, c) rationalisation of work, speed ups, redundancies. These are also relevant to the question of growing food on tiny farms.
I will put down some thoughts on agriculture in a very schematic fashion:
1. India doesn't have much fallow land which can be brought under cultivation. 2. Population is still growing at about 2% per year. Fertility ratio has gone down rougly from 6 to 3.5 in 50 years. But India will have a population of at least 1.5 bn by 2050. 3. China's compulsory 'one child' policy is not feasible in India. 4. Even if you distribute land through land reforms, you need to provide for water. India is likely to face serious water shortages in the coming years. 5. The notion that India as a whole needs land reforms needs to be reexamined. 5.1 Landlordism did not exist in all parts of India even under the British rule. Peasant proprietorship existed in some parts. 5.2 Land reforms have taken place in Kerala and West Bengal with a combined population of 110 million. This is larger than that of any nation in Europe. Bengal and Kerala are limits of contemporary Left influence in India. This wasn't the case 40-50 years ago. In Andhra Pradesh (Pop. 75 million in 2000) CP was very strong. Andhra would have been another Kerala and Bengal. The Left could not retain its mass base, but under the pressure of the peasant movements land reforms have taken place in Andhra and elsewhere. 5.3 Land reforms are only one of ways in which agrarian relations change. Lenin was clear about this when he distinguished different forms of bourgeois revolution. He writes about "American path" and "Junker path". We also know how he saw Stolypins ("Stolypin the hangman") reforms in Russia. So even where land reform have been inadequate, agrarian relations are changing. 5.4 I doubt if one could characterise Indian agriculture as a whole as semi-feudal. India's urban population is 270-280 million. Can you imagine feudal or semi-feudal agriculture supporting such large numbers? 6. If non farm occupations don't grow fast enough, plots of tend to get subdivided/fragmented. Not only big Indian farms are tiny by the US standard, but they will get smaller and smaller if non-farm jobs don't grow fast enough. 7. We don't have internal passport system (like the fSU) that can prevent migration into urban area. So urban sprawls are inevitable, unless non farm jobs are created in the villages.
There aren't simple answers to these problems.
Ulhas