Moreover, while the northwest provinces standardized the unit - lot as one square acre square through land readjustment for exchanges and consolidations, the best attempted by the downstream Ganges area was only exchanges of lands and no standardization was made in terms of the forms of farmland.
Naturally, the rectangulation of fields allows effective design of canals, which then makes water distribution more efficient, and enables mechanization effective. But with the status quo, where land ownership is multi-layered as the result of an attempt to evade tenant farming problems and land reform laws, the economically efficient projects of land consolidation have hardly made any progress2. Thus, in the downstream Ganges areas, food production has been increased mainly by farmers who have relatively sufficient funds and large farmland such as to enable the installation of tube wells. This situation implies limitations on increase in production and involves the risk of drawing the income distribution in the rural communities towards further inequality.
2-3 Farmers and Market Nexus
The Green Revolution drew the farmers through various paths into the new world - a market economy. Let us discuss the farmers' market nexus (the degree of involvement in a market) in terms of products and input resources.
Figure 1-9 shows the rate by scale of wheat (winter crops) marketed by farmers in Pubjab, at the time the diffusion of the Green Revolution was almost completed. The rate becomes positive at about 0.4ha of landholding, reaches 50% at the scale of about 0.6ha, and then 90% at about 3ha. Since the average size of landholding in Pubjab is 3.77ha, almost all farmers are considered to market their wheat. Because this region is not a rice-eating one, most of their rice (summer crops) is transported to other states. These tendencies are more or less the same as in Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. In these regions, newly emerging well-off farmers having market surplus have formed a new social class. Such data are not obtainable from most other states, so let us review the research data of Bihar (Table 1-8, Research conducted in 1979-81), for example.
