¹ This paper is based on the experience of a year of work with village and farm business surveys in India for the India Project of the Center for International Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on widespread discussion with academic people, field workers, government and Reserve Bank people, extension workers, and others with a large acquaintance with the country.

² The making of these surveys began with Dr. Harold H. Mann when he was principal of the College of Agriculture, Poona, forty years ago. See his Land and Labour in a Deccan Village (London, 1917)Google Scholar, and his Land and Labour in a Deccan Village, Study No. 2 (London, 1921)Google Scholar.

³ E.g., Agarwala, B. S., “Economic Survey of Mirapur Basahi Village,” Indian Journal of Economics, XI (1930–1931)Google Scholar; Bhalla, R. L., Report on an Economic Survey of Bairampur (Lahore, 1922)Google Scholar; Bhatnagar, B. G., Studies in Rural Economy of Allahabad (Allahabad, 1924)Google Scholar; Gadgil, D. R. & Gadgil, V. R., A Survey of Farm Business in Wai Taluka (Poona, 1940)Google Scholar; Akhtar, M. Hasan, An Inquiry into Mortgages of Agricultural Land in the Pothwar Assessment Circle of Rawalpindi District in the Punjab (Lahore, 1926)Google Scholar; Indian Society of Agricultural Economics, Bhadkad (Bombay, 1957)Google Scholar; Iyengar, S. K., Economic Investigations in the Hyderabad State, 1929–30 (Hyderabad [Deccan] 1931)Google Scholar; Iyengar, S. K., The Hyderabad Economic Village Studies (Hyderabad [Deccan] 1952)Google Scholar; Jain, S. P., Relationship Between Fertility and Economic and Social Status in the Punjab (Lahore, 1939)Google Scholar; Mukhtyar, G. C., Life and Labour in a South Gujarat Village (Calcutta, 1930)Google Scholar; Shah, V. & Shah, S., Bhuvel: Socio-Economic Survey of a Village (Bombay, 1939)Google Scholar; Shukla, J. B., Life and Labour in a Gujarat Tulaka (Calcutta, 1937)Google Scholar; Singh, R. & Roberts, W., “An Economic Survey of Kala Gaddi Ghamman, 1932” in Reserve Bank of India, Review of the Cooperative Movement in India, 1939–40 (Bombay, 1941)Google Scholar; Slater, G., Some South Indian Villages (London, 1918)Google Scholar; Thomas, P. J., Some South Indian Villages: A Resurvey (Madras, 1940)Google Scholar.

⁴ The Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Poona; the University of Madras; the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi; and the University of Santiniketan, West Bengal.

⁵ There are also six farm costing projects in the Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Bombay, and Madras. The projects are designed to discover the costs of production and input-output profile of various crops and sizes of farms. These centers conduct surveys of the usual interview kind and also keep records on the spot for another group of farmers in an effort to discover if the more expensive on-the-spot record keeping is worthwhile in terms of the differences in results. These are purely farm business research projects and differ in scope and technique from the village surveys.

⁶ Two other forms of rural research are an exception to this generalization: the Punjab Board of Economic Enquiry keeps farm accounts for some thirty farmers scattered throughout the Punjab, who are representative of cultivating proprietors only in regard to the size of their holdings; and six Farm Costing Project Centers gather records from farmers selected by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in a state sampling procedure from district to village to cultivator.

⁷ For certain wide classifications of data the direction of bias can be guessed with a good deal of confidence. In general, output data will be understated in order to avoid supplying evidence that there is greater taxable capacity than had been thought, except in the cases of data from Community Projects where the output figures are very likely to be overstated in order to prove that the Project is succeeding. However, for any farm or small group of farms one cannot be sure which of these considerations will triumph, and as the text will show, there are so many other considerations from ignorance to neighbors' opinions that a plausible argument can be made either for over- or for understatement in any specific case.

⁸ Good data are found occasionally, as in the records of the Indian Central Jute Committee, where Mr. Hans Pilhoffer of M.I.T. found about two thirds of the records examined satisfactory. However, these records were kept by field workers, three to a village, who lived in the villages continuously for six years.

⁹ An incident may illustrate: upon entering a storeroom to see the potato harvest I asked how much the yield had been. The respondent, a most courteous and generous host, replied “seventy-five maunds, maybe eighty, or perhaps ninety—say a hundred.” My companion pointed out to me, using this reply as evidence, that cultivators did know and could tell you the yield of their crops!

¹⁰ At the same institution one finds both well and poorly conducted surveys. It depends very much on the field personnel and their supervisors. Excellent administrators at the top of the surveying hierarchy cannot guarantee the performance of the lower ranks because of the sheer volume of work-supervision.

¹¹ See Mann, Land and Labour in a Deccan Village (note 2).

¹² See Mann, Land and Labour in a Deccan Village, Study No. 2 (note 2).

¹³ To illustrate, I have found a respondent recording, as if he were the sole owner, a well shared with a neighbor, and a two-pulley well as a “double well.” In another case the land was recorded as unirrigated, which it was in the sense that there were no wells or public irrigation canals, but which was nevertheless laced by stone channels and earthen bundhs (dikes) to canalize and control theflowof water from the mountain above, so that it differed i n this respect significantly from the unirrigated fields in the plains or in other hilly areas.

¹⁴ As a result of the lateness and heaviness of the rains in the Deccan during the summer of 1955 the crop in the area was a “four to eight anna” crop. A sixteen anna crop is presumed normal, yet in no sense was this regarded as a disasterous season.

¹⁵ I believe the only such research with an emphasis on economic magnitudes is that of Mrs. Scarlett Trent of Manchester University in one irrigated and one dry village in Mysore. The time spent residing in these two neighboring villages was two years. (The results are not yet available.)

¹⁶ The number of wells is an important indicator of capital development. Outside of areas serviced by the government canal system—most of India is outside this area—wells mean the difference between frequent crop failure (or partial failure) and a moderate degree of success in farming. Wells are also the biggest—most expensive—item of capital improvement.

¹⁷ At the Gokhale Institute there are only two surveys with a span of years between. At Delhi School there are none. I have found one in the literature on Uttar Pradesh, none in the literature on the Punjab, only Professor Thomas' resurveys of the villages surveyed by Professor Slater for Madras, and a resurvey of a village in Gujarat (see Bhadkad, note 3). The Indian Central Jute Committee has surveyed a large number of Bengal jute farmers on a continuous basis in regard to their jute-growing activities, and a report on this work may be expected from the M.I.T. Center for International Studies. The Agro-Economic Centers will be resurveying the villages they are now surveying after a lapse of five years, but until that time comparisons over time will depend upon additional survey work by the visiting investigator.