1^ SOCIAL SCIENT1 Table XII :§r
Total Income ?s Relative to Poverty Levels
1Peasant Class 2 Noncultiva" tion Incomes 3 Percentage of (2) from wage work 4 Total Disposable Income Devie Total sable from line 5 ition of Dispo-Income Poverty-
(a) (b)
Rich 115.3 0.0 1974.7 318.8 732.8
Middle 116.9 0.4 1873.2 21.1 484.1
Small 157.1 3.7 1340.3 -786.6 -254.9
Poor 345.5 37.6 738.6 — 1152.8 -680.0
Landless labourer 1031.15 96.4 1227.8 -278.9 97.8
Petty employer 200.0 0.0 508.8 -406.8 ov -177.9
Note : In column f and (b) the >, (a) is the dei deviation from ration from the Planning Comm the Dandekar-Rath line. ission p< erty line
1. U. Patnaik, 'Economics of farm size and farm scale : some assumptions re-examined', EPW, Vol. VII, Nos. 31-33, Special No. Aug. 1972.
2. U. Patnaik, 'Class differentiation within the peasantry : an approach to the analysis of Indian agriculture', EPW, Vol. XT, No. 39, Sept. 25, 1976. (In his recem Political Economy of Under development, Amiya K. Bagchi has referred to my discussion in that article, of the criteria employed by V.I. Lenin in the context of China, as the 'Lenin-Mao' classification, much in the same spirit that N.K. Chandra had, much earlier, referred to the 'Kautsky-Lenin law of concentration*. We would be happier with a somewhat different formulation :
what is being talked about, is the Marxist approach to identifying rural classes, or the Marxist law of capitalist concentration. While Lenin, Kautsky or Mao were certainly prominent Marxists, the acceptance of the basic principles involved extend to many thousands of other people ; it would be equally invidious to talk of 'the Samuelson law of diminishing marginal utility' !).
3. This sample was drawn under an ICSSR-financed project directed by Dr. Sheila Bhalla on small farmers and labourers in Haryana. I am very greatful to Dr. Bhalla for giving me permission to analyse the data and to publish the results.
4. For a discussion of discriminant functions and Mahalanobis distance, see C.R. Rao, Linear Statistical Inference and Its Applications (New Delhi, 1965), pp. 565-567.
5. E. Araquem da Silva, 'Measuring the incidence of peasant capitalism : an analysis of survey data from north-east Brazil', Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, October 1984.
