Economic Reform : Some Observations 29 drastically brought down within the village and perhaps in communes, inter-commune disparities persisted. It is these disparities which seem to be reflected in the recently published statistics of rural inequality in China. The 100 million people estimated to be in 'poverty' probably consist in large, if not most, part of people in the relatively poor regions and communes. That despite a revolution driven by intense ideological zeal and manned by motivated cadres, the land reforms chose not to address inter-commune disparities is significant. It does serve as a reminder of the limits of redistributive land reform even in radical regimes. The commune system, the other major innovation of the Maoist period, has also been largely dismantled; the system was built on the principle of collective ownership and use of all productive resources in rural areas, the intention being to combine egalitarian distribution with self-reliant local development under the leadership of the cadres of the Chinese Communist Party. Official data released in recent years suggest that Chinese agriculture made remarkably rapid progress under this system in terms of overall rate of output growth. Particularly impressive, to an Indian observer, is its achievement in mobilising local resources for providing a minimal standard of social services and improving productive facilities without much contribution from the State. The inevitable tension between the ideal of egalitarian distribution and incentive for effort manifested itself quite early. It can also be granted that centralised determination, in detail, of production and input targets reaching down to the commune; the excessive emphasis on local food self-sufficiency, 'grain as the key-link'; and the system of compulsory deliveries cumulatively tend to depress productivity and growth. While there is a strong case for reducing the ambit and mode of State intervention, it is not obvious that the abandonment of the commune was necessary, especially since it served a very important role in local resource mobilisation, and provided an institutional medium for managing the use of common resources, especially land and water. There is little question that the move away from communes is also a move away from egalitarianism. It is likely to reduce interest in and allocation for collective consumption, and widen disparities within communes, possibly even between regions. The recent reforms are quite conscious of this but seem to consider it desirable to ^ encourage initiative and effort. The official statistics report phenomenal rise in agricultural output following the 'reform' and were cited as evidence of its success. But there is reason to be somewhat sceptical of these statistics. It seems likely that at least a part of them represent what was already being produced but not reported. The emphasis in China on local community responsibility to take care of basic education, health services and a certain minimum amount of social welfare (to take care of the old and the children), as well as for much of the productive capital formation, marked it out sharply from the Indian situation where most of the responsibility for niobilising resources and financing most of the investment as well as all social amenities right down