54 , * SOCIAL SCIENTIST to resume land up to the ceiling limit. Further, the Sixth Plan notes that in regard to the conferment of ownership rights on cultivating tenants, the existing legislation in Haryana and Punjab, as well as in some other states, "still falls short of the accepted national policy9'.4 The National Commission has noted that the implementation of even the existing laws has been "extremely unsatisfactory. Ceilings were seriously evaded. In anticipation of ceilings, the big landholders resorted to partitioning of their holdings and fictitiously transferring them in pieces to other individuals through what is called 'benami' transfers on a very large scale, with the result that the state government could secure very little surplus land for distribution among the poor."5 Hence an essential step for rural development is more effective land reform. It needs to be appreciated that the concentration of land ownership has economic, political, social and cultural repercussions. Thus the concentration of power makes the working of democratic Institutions like panchayats into a mockery. Socially, there is a correlation between lowness of caste and landlessness. Culturally, the prevailing agrarian structure has been the breeding ground of obscurantism. Political, social and cultural development can therefore take off only by doing away with the remnants of feudalism. Capitalism in Agriculture In Punjab and Haryana capitalism has tended to develop in agriculture. There are some big farmers "who mainly depend upon farm labour, as distinguished from the majority who rely mainly on family labour, supplemented, in the case of the better-off ones, by migrant labour during sowing and harvesting periods. There are great inequalities in farm size between the biggest and the smallest farmers. Thus in a comprehensive survey of Punjab agriculture made in 1975-76, Bhalla and Chadha found that in a total sample of 1663 households, there were 140 (8.4 per cent) having marginal farms of the average size of 1.6 acres, while there were 74 (4.4 per cent) large farms of the average size of 32.8 acres.6 Thus the biggest farms were, on an average, about 20 times the size of the smallest ones. Such inequalities are often justified on the grounds of higher productivity of large farms. However, it is interesting^ to note that the annual agricultural income from each acre of land was Rs 754.50 in the case of the smallest farms and Rs 740.40 for the largest ones. In other words, there is evidence to show that the' smallest farmers are atleast as productive as the biggest ones. Hence, in terms of production efficiency, such inegalitarian distribution of land cannot be justified. As for income distribution, we find that the total yearly farm income of the smallest farmer's household was only Rs 1,231,while that of the biggest one was Rs 24,283. In other words, the small farmer who was no less productive than the biggest one, and whose whole family worked on the farm, was much poorer than the one who hardly ever