It is clear thus far that rural poverty in southern Morang has complex roots. Unlike in many villages of the Eastern Gangetic Plains, there is not a local landlord class or a traditional caste-based land ownership hierarchy, where villages are divided into neighbourhoods by caste, with clear disparities of wealth in terms of housing and asset ownership. The region also does not experience the open political and ideological subjugation by a local dominant caste or landlord class at a local level, such as those which garnered support for the Naxalite struggle in Bihar in the 1980s and 1990s (Kunnath, 2017) or in the central Tarai-Madhesh during Nepal's People's War. However, the largely Adivasi peasantry experiences a silent drain of resources through a more complex and ‘distant’ network of feudal exploitation, with rents being appropriated in parallel by urban-based landlords and merchant capital.

It is important to now understand what this means for household livelihoods and the reproduction of rural poverty in southern Morang, as well as the long-term opportunities for ‘accumulation’ within the peasantry. The first section of this chapter explores the ability of households to meet their minimum subsistence needs or produce a surplus in the context of ground rent, distress commerce and usury. The second goes on to look at the implications of this drain of resource for investment on the land – in other words, it explores the constraining role played by the relations of production in developing the forces of production at a time of economic liberalisation and state-promoted commercialisation.