REGULATED MARKETS 23 lively competitive, allocatively efficient, free private market at minimal costs to itself. Such intervention assumes the prior existence of ^a number of unfair practices like uncertified weights, unauthorised deductions and high rates of commission", indicative of monopoly or oligopoly control of commodity markets "which took away a substantial share of the price paid by the final consumer and placed the... farmer cum seller at a disadvantageous position...against the organised sector of the trading class.553 It is assumed that by such intervention imperfect or monopolistic markets may be rendered more effectively competitive through time and it will progressively benefit producers and consumers. The emphasis on competition in the existing body of evaluative research on commodity markets has the ideological ramification that the restriction of the active role of the state to regulatory functions will achieve the objectives of both efficiency and equity. Market regulation, based on the model acts for cash crops of the 1897 Berar Cotton and Grain Markets Law and the more celebrated 1927 Bombay Cotton Market Act, has been slow and somewhat serendipitous. IN ANDHRA PRADESH In Andhra Pradesh there are notable contrasts between the legislation covering the former princely state of Hyderabad and coastal Andhra. In the former Hyderabad state the Hyderabad Agricultural Markets Act, a comprehensive piece of law covering all crops and standardizing the organization of exchange had been enacted as early as 1930 which was implemented by a separate department of marketing4. In its evaluation of this Act, the Law Commission of Andhra Pradesh asserts that early regulation (or its possibility, for certainly not all markets in the Hyderabad state were regulated in the thirties) focussed exchange in regulated market sites rather than in villages, and ^'it must be said that the legislation enacted with wisdom and foresight in the former State of Hyderabad has been a boon to the ryots."5 Under it, cereals and pulses have always been regulated in Telengana. By contrast, the Andhra area came under the jurisdiction of the 1933 Madras Commercial Crops Act. This was restricted in its coverage to cash crops: cotton, jaggery, groundnut and tobacco. There was no precise concept of the notified (^catchment") area of a market, nor was allowance made for the standardization of transactional procedures or of fees. The Law Commission said: "The markets governed by this Act have not functioned properly