Criteria to Classify Village

Eminent sociologists have put forward many criteria to classify village communities. Some of these are:

(A) According to one criterion the village aggregates have been classified according to the types which evolved during the period of the transition from man’s nomadic existence to settled village life. Thus villages have been divided into three groups: 

• The Migratory agricultural villages where the people live in fixed abodes only for a few months;
• The semi-permanent agricultural villages where the population resides for a few years and then migrates due to the exhaustion of the soil; and
• The permanent agricultural villages where the settled human aggregates live for generations and even centuries.

(B) According to the second criterion villages have been classified into grouped (or nucleated) villages and dispersed villages. In grouped villages, the farmers dwell in the village proper in a cluster. They work on the fields which lie outside the village site. Since they dwell together in a single habitat, they develop a compact life. In the case of the non-nucleated dispersed village type, the farmers live separately on their respective farms. Their habitats are thus dispersed, and their social life assumes a different form.

(C) Village arrogates have been also classified according to a third criterion, that of social differentiation, stratification, mobility, and land, ownership.

Thus criterion group village aggregates into six broad types viz.

• That composed of peasant's joint owns;
• That composed of peasant joint tenants;
• That composed of farmers who are mostly individual owners, but also include some tenants and laborers;
• That composed of individual farmer tenants;
• That composed of employees of a great private landowner; and
• That is composed of laborers and employees of the state, the church, the city, or the public landowner.

Reference

Rural Sociology by Dr. G. Das