68 SOCIAL SCIENTIST «. one to probe this question in greater depth. However, all said and done, the work under review represents a painstaking, impressive, honest and extremely useful effort to put together a comprehensive picture of changes in Tamil Nadu's rural economy in the third quarter of the twentieth century. 14; is fitting that the ICSSR has accepted it as a model for similar studies m other states. As a "first information report" the work is truly pioneering. V B ATHREYA* 1 See for a summary of the debate on the mode of production in Indian agriculture, John Harriss, Contemporary Marxist Analysis of the Agrarian Question in India, Working paper No 14 of the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Madras. 1980. 2 See, for instance, G Djurfeldt and S Lindberg, Behind Poverty; The Social Formation in a Tamil Village^ London, Curzon Press, 1975. 3 However, Kurien modifies this later, on p 142, in the following terms: "But in another sense, a quiet structural transformation has been going on in rural Tamil Nadu. The main feature of this transformation is the tendency of small farmers to leave land and farming to join the ranks of the rural proletariat." 4 Incidentally, there are several discrepancies between Kurien's figures on production and productivity and official figures. These might have arisen from Kurien having used preliminary estimates for 1973-74 and 1975-76. 5 In fact, on the same page, referring to the time series of farm prices for paddy and millets at the state level and paddy at the district level, Kurien says: "Even at the state level the stable prices for 1966-67 to 1968-69 in the case of paddy and 1966-67 and 1967-68 in the case of millets look somewhat suspicious. The problem becomes more pronounced when we turn to the district level partly because data are available for only a much shorter period, but mainly because the farm price o£ paddy is shown as Rs. 45 per quintal in all districts for those three years and of cumbu and cholam are also shown as Rs 50 per quintal in every district for the two years* It would therefore appear that these are not in fact actual prices, but possibly prices arbitrarily supplied to complete the series." 6 It is theoretically wrong to conclude from FMS evidence that shows lower per hectare farm business income and lower percentage return on capital for large farms as opposed to small farms, that the small farms are more efficient as Kurien does on p 133. To further conclude therefrom that since larger farms because of sheer size generate larger surpluses, "...the more efficient will just survive or even disappear over time, while the less efficient ones will continue to grow and prosper" (p 133) is certainly most misleading, given the heterogeneity with respect to productive forces and relations of production that exist among large farms. 7 K Marx, Gfundrisse, Pelican, 1974, p 101. 8 ^ Earlier, Kurien states (p 121) that the clue to the understanding of rural transformation is not only to be found in who has benefited from the changes, "but also the manner in which we are able to explain the phenomenon in terms of the working of the rural economy in general". Later (p 133), Kurien sees the clue to the rural transformation thus: "The annual returns from farm operations enable the members of the small farms at best to survive whereas they help the large farms to continue their process of accumulation so that in subsequent periods the gap between the small and the large in terms of assets will increase. This is exactly what we have noticed in rural Tamil Nadu and is the clue to the understanding of rural transformation". Kurien's task in this regard would have been made easier had he used the approach of class analysis that he has self-consciously avoided. *Reader in Economics, Bharatidasan University, Tiruchy.