In a rapidly urbanising nation, rural India is being erased from the popular imagination. Through her five years of travelling across the villages of Tamil Nadu, Aparna Karthikeyan gets to know men and women who do exceptional—yet perfectly ordinary—things to earn a living. She documents, through ten of these stories, the transformations, aspirations and disruptions of the last twenty-five years. The people she meets force these questions of her, and her reader: What is the culture we seek to preserve? What will become of food security without farmers? How can ‘development’ exclude 833 million people? Including interviews with journalist P. Sainath, musician T.M. Krishna and writer Bama, among others, Nine Rupees an Hour is a critical portrayal of the drastic and systematic erosion of traditional livelihoods.