20 SOCIAL SCIENTIST tricts, the spark has been lit. This aspect will be dealt with in a later note. (The writer is grateful to Professor C T Kurien of the Economics Department y Madras Christian College, for lending his working papers on aspects of the agrarian situation in various districts in Tamil Nadu.) 1 The Perspective Plan for Tamil J^adu : Towards A Greener Revolution, Report of the Task Force on Agriculture, 1972-1984, Vols I and II, State Planning Commission, Madras. 8 Ibid., p 1. 8 Ibid.,? 2. 4 See George Blyn, Agricultural Trends in India, 1891-1947 : Output, Availability and Productivity, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1966, for a statistical framework; Some South Indian Villages edited by Gilbert Slater and published by the University of Madras in 1918; Some South Indian Villages : A Resurvey edited by P J Thomas and K. C Ramakrishnan and published by the University in 1940; and Report on Agricultural Indebtedness by W R S Sathyanathan, ICS, submitted to the Government of Madras in 1935. 8 Wolf Ladejinsky, the Ford Foundation specialist who studied the suitability of Thanjavur's tenurial conditions—including the condition of tenancy—to the 'Green Revolution', concluded that Thanjavur was "a district with one of the nation's worst land tenure systems. . . If land tenure conditions were a part of the criteria for selecting a package district. . . Thanjavur wouldn't qualify at all". The Tamil Nadu Government's indignant response to Ladejinsky's scathing criticism of the tenurial conditions of Thanjavur is indicated in A Study of Tenurial Conditions in Package Districts by Wolf Ladejinsky, Planning Commission, Government of India, 1965. Francine Frankel of USAID found that although economic gains', which were not impressive in the case of paddy, had accrued, they had been accompanied by the tremendous 'political cost'. The poor peasants, the sharecroppers and the agricultural workers were adversely affected by the 'Green Revolution'. She found that the Kilvenmani massacre *'had much deeper roots in the progressive polarisation between landowners and labourers that started as early as the first Communist-led agitations in 1948", and mentions that an administrator told her about the situation in East Thanjavur : "We are at the beginning of trouble yet." See India's Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Costs by Francine Frankel, Princeton University Press, USA, and Oxford University Press, Bombay, 1971. 6 V P Chintan, "Why This Power Cut", a Tamil pamphlet published by the Tamil Nadu Committee of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions in March 1973, for an excellent assessment of the causes of the power famine and its impact. 7 This is, of course, an allusion to the DMK's election symbol. 8 K S Sonachalam, Land Reforms in Tamil Nadu : Evaluation and Implementation, sponsored by the Planning Commission, Research Programme Committee and published by the Oxford and IBH Publishing Co, 1970. 9 Out of a population W 41.2 million in Tamil Nadu, the rural population was 28.7 million in 1971 (Source : Census of 1971). The estimate of 21 million as the agrarian population was arrived at on the basis of the State Planning Commission's estimate that about 73 per cent of the rural population is supported by agriculture. 10 The Tamil Nadu Agricultural Census as part of the Agricultural Census in India has been conducted with reference to the agricultural year, July 1970 to June 1971. The field work has been done by the field staff of the Revenue and Land