2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
trading firms and cheap developing country suppliers of prespecified products since the 1960s. The survey provides a critical appraisal of the factors determining such subcontracting irr the developed and less developed world, the fall-out in terms of net benefits for the latter and arguments regarding the likelihood of the phenomenon persisting. While arguing that that international subcontracting had offered little be way of employment, industrial growth or foreign exchange earning for the Third World and that there are technological developments that militate against the rapid spread of the phenomenon, the article cautions against extreme positions either of the technological deter-minist kind that predict an end to subcontracting or of the new international division of labour kind that predict a substantial relocation of industry from the core to the periphery.
Finally, the issue carries two articles relating to agricultural development in different parts of the country during the colonial and post-Independence periods. In the first of these Brahma Nand examines the argument, developed on the basis of the western Indian experience, that the agrarian sector displayed a remarkable degree of expansion and prosperity during the colonial period. While showing that this thesis is not supported by the available evidence on population movements, that on the number of plough cattle and that on intensive farming practices, he argues that the only source of 'expansion* if any was the movement onto less productive lands, that could not overcome the problems of low growth and sharp fluctuations in production, resulting in a high degree of vulnerability to famines.
In another context, the Dakshina Kannada District in Karnataka, C.B. Damie contests the view that post-Independence Tenancy legislation was successful in altering agrarian relations in favour of the erstwhile tenants. Rather, he argues, because of delays in implementation which provided the landlords with time to resume land through eviction and because of the inability of many tenants to purchase leased in land from the landlords, the number of tenants who were real beneficiaries of land reform legislation was less than 30 per cent and the agrarian structure though denuded of the worst forms of open tenancy, remained one characterised by a high degree of land monopoly.