466 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
According to the Hon. Mr. Keatinge an economic holding is :—
“a holding which allows a man chance of producing sufficient to support himself and his family in reasonable comfort, after paying his necessary expenses.” [16]
His definition of an economic holding will be accepted, we may expect, by the Baroda Committee; for, it does not differ from its own, given above as third in order. Assuming they agree, we may now proceed to see how far tenable this definition is.
It is plain that these definitions including that of Professor Jevons view an economic holding from the stand-point of consumption rather than of production. In this lies their error; for consumption is not the correct standard by which to judge the economic character of a holding. It would be perverse accounting to condemn a farm as not paying because its total output does not support the family of the farmer though as a pro-rata return for each of his investments it is the highest. The family of a farmer can only be looked upon in the light of so much labour corps at his disposal. It may well be that some portion of this labour corps is superfluous, though it has to be supported merely in obedience to social custom as is the case in India. But if our social custom compels a farmer to support some of his family members even when he cannot effectively make any use of them on his farm we must be careful not to find fault with the produce of the farm because it does not suffice to provide for the workers as well as the dependants that may happen to compose the family. The adoption of such an accounting system will declare many enterprises as failures when they will be the most successful. There can be no true economic relation between the family of the entrepreneur and the total out-turn of his farm or industry. True economic relation can subsist only between the total out-turn and the investments. If the total out-turn pays for all the investments no producer in his senses will ever contemplate closing his industry because the total out-turn does not support his family. This is evident; for though production is for the purpose of consumption it is for the consumption only of those who help to produce. It follows, then, that if the relation between out-turn and investments is a true economic relation, we can only speak of a farm as economic, i.e., paying in the sense of production and not in the sense of consumption. Any definition, therefore, that leans on consumption mistakes the nature of an economic holding which is essentially an enterprise in production.
Before going further, we must clear the ground by a few preliminary remarks to facilitate the understanding of an economic holding from the standpoint of production.
- Rural Economy in the Bombay Deccan, p. 51.