40 SOCIAL SCIENTIST agriculture being very low, a vast proportion of the population had an extremely low standard of living. The agrarian structure itself was characterised by three types of settlements—Zamindari, Ryotwari and Mahalwari. In Zamindari areas, absentee landlords were given the right to collect land revenue and they increasingly acquired titles of land; intermediary tenures were most prevalent; leasing and sub-leasing of* land^were commonly practised, and the tenants had hardly any defined rights. In Ryotwari and Mahalwari areas, the cultivating section of the village community was given direct land rights and in theory intermediatry tenure did not obtain. But in practice, leasing in and out of land took place on a large scale, as land transfers had been legalised and land had passed into the hands of non-cultivators due to indebtedness and other reasons. It was only in the beginning of the 20th century that legislation was passed prohibiting the purchase of cultivators' land by the non-cultivating castes. However, by this time, immense harm had already been doAe. In any case, bigger landlords that belonged to the cultivating castes continued to purchase land from. the smaller ones. Furthermore, batiami land transactions went unchecked; superimposed on this were the various land grants and Jagirs given to feudal remnants and faithful servants of the raj by the British rulers. In the princely states of India, by and large, landlordism existed in its naked form with all sorts of lease arrangements, and tenants had no defined rights. The vested interests created in land provided very powerful support to the British raj, but the existence of these semi-feudal relations acted as tke most important barrier to the development of agriculture. By and large the production technology in agriculture was also traditional and primitive. It is notable that the attempts to modernise agriculture during the British period were mainly confined to increasing the production of non-food crops for meeting the export demand. It was only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that a belated attempt was made to increase area under irrigation to avoid recurring famines. This led to a fairly ambitious programme of development of canal irrigation. As a consequence of this policy, 23.5 per cent of total cultivated area had been brought under irrigation by 1944-45. However, because of the insistence that any investment in irrigation should meet the 'productivity' criterion, 90 per cent of total irrigated area, uiltil the forties, was concentrated in the four provinces of Punjab, Sirid^ the United Provinces and Madras. The rest of the country continued to depend on the vagaries of the monsoon. Very little was done to create other infrastructure. Only a beginning had been made in developing agricultural research institutions and cooperative credit societies. However, except in a few places like Punjab, Bombay and Madras, their impact was negligible. The consequence of inhibitive land relations and lack of adequate infrastructure was that foodgrains output did not show any increase