Cultivator and Agricultural Labourer UPSC relevant
Within the census's four-fold classification of workers, a cultivator is a person engaged in cultivation of land owned or held from government or private persons for payment in money, kind or share — direction and supervision of cultivation count, but working on another person's land purely for wages does not.
That latter person is an agricultural labourer: one who works on another's land for wages in cash or kind, with no risk in the cultivation and no right of lease or contract on the land. The remaining categories are household industry workers and 'other workers'. These distinctions, applied to main and marginal workers alike, underpin the census-town test (share of male main workers outside agriculture) and will show in 2027 how far India's workforce has actually moved off the farm since 2011.