SMALL HOLDINGS IN INDIA AND THEIR REMEDIES
I
IMPORTANCE OF AGRICULTURE
A study of the economic ways of getting a living will ever remain important. These ways generally take the form of industries or services. Confining ourselves to industries, they may be divided into primary and secondary. The primary industries are concerned with extracting useful material from the earth, the soil or water and take the form of hunting, fishing, stockraising, lumbering and mining. These primary or extractive industries are fundamental in two ways : (1) They extract from the physical world useful materials which become the original sources of man’s subsistence. (2) They provide raw materials for the secondary or manufacturing industries, for, manufactures, in the language of Dr. Franklin, are simply, “substance metamorphosed”. From a national point of view as well, the importance of primary industries is beyond question. But important as are the primary industries, farming is by far the most important of them all. It is most ancient and abiding of all industries, primary or secondary : while the fact that it is concerned with the production of food is enough to make its problems demand our most serious thought. But when a country, like India, depends almost wholly upon farming its importance cannot be exaggerated. The problems of agricultural economy dealing directly with agricultural production are what to produce, the proper proportion of the factors of production, the size of holdings, the tenures of land etc. In this paper it is attempted to deal only with the problem of the size of holdings as it affects the productivity of agriculture.
II
SMALL HOLDINGS IN INDIA
It may be said that some countries are predominantly countries of small holdings while in others it is the large holdings that prevail. According to