2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST duction over large scale production, the absence of any systematic tendency towards differentiation within the peasantry, etc. She uses the extent to which outside labour is used relative to family labour, or the extent to which family labour works for others as the criterion for grouping cultivating households into categories such as landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, and poor peasants. Employing this criterion for classification, derived from Lenin's tradition as against the usual official classification according to acreage groups, to primary data collected from Haryana, she obtains a set of striking results, from the statistics : inputs used as well as outputs obtained per acre increase noticeably with class-status ; marketed output as a proportion of total output also increases with class-status ; the Green Revolution technology is unevenly distributed across classes ; and only the labour-hiring classes obtain surpluses while all the others register deficits. These results strongly question the validity of neo-populist conclusions abut the superiority of petty-production. Since a prevalent explanation of such alleged superiority is the supposedly lower production per acre in labour-hiring farms, her results constitute a direct refutation ®f such hypotheses. Growing differentiation within cultivating households is also the theme of Atiur Rahman's paper. Using a variety of data, from secondary sources as well as from field surveys conducted by himself, the author underscores not only the extent of differentiation which exists in Bangladesh, but also the fact that this differentiation has been increasing ; what is more, this differentiation appears to have been increasing at a faster pace in areas which have acquired some "Green Revolution" technology. With a process of dispossession of the poor and enlargement of the rich holdings underway, efforts at characterising of Bangladesh society as being in a ''quasi-stable equilibrium" lack any factual basis. The neo-populist view of a stable peasantry cannot derive any sustenance from the experience of Bangladesh. We hope the papers presented in this number will stimulate wide-ranging discussion on the agrarian question and the processes of transition. We shall try and publish more on these themes in our coming numbers.