4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST that were carried out, while abolishing certain kinds of intehnecfiary tftitre and eliminating significantly the very large, and often absentee, landlords, did not mean the end of landlordism. At one end, a somewhat more homogeneous class of landlords was created; at the other end, there was outright eviction or degradation in status of large numbers of petty-tenants; and, in between, a section of rich peasant tenants moved up the social scale by acquiring ownership rights. But, land concentration was not broken/The landownership data for 1953-54 (NSS 8th round) give a gini coefficient of 0.676, while those for 1970-71 (NSS 26th round) give a gini coefficient of 0.675.1 Meanwhile, the proportion of agricultural labourers in the total of cultivators and labourers rose significantly, from 28 per cent in 1951 to at least 35 per cent in 1971.2 Under these circumstances, the transformation of agriculture, within the overall context of capitalist development of the economy, was, perforce, characterised, predominantly, by the development of a semi-feudal capitalism in the countryside.8 This was already implicit in th^ logic of the land reforrir legislattons.4 Since a wholesale attack on landed property,'as envisaged in the ^land-to-the-tiller" slogan, was ruled out, lest it re6brind 4rito an attack on bourgeois property, the land reform legislations ttefaor selves contained clauses (eg. land being exempt from ceiling laW if s 3. Under this dispensation, the growth of agricultural output'and incomes, taking the country as a whole, has been meagre, especially in view of the gap that exists between our actual yields and the potential ^felds (as measured for instance by the achievements of Japanese and Chinese agriculture). Professor Dandekar has recently shown that the real r^t domestic product originating in agriculture, when taken per head of thfif agriculture dependent population, has scarcely not shown any noticeable increase over the post-independence period as a whole. To be sure, the decline in per capita real NDP of the agriculture-dependent population, that had characterised the half-century before independence, has been hated, bttt it Aas not been reversed. Dandekar^s conclusions are borne otit c^tli€€lehdy if we look at the period since 1970-71 for which we have, from National ^counts Statistics ^ a continuous series of sector-wise NDP at c