Heath s Visit- What s He Coming For

applications, crop patterns, organisational structures and marketing strategies. As in other rapidly modernising segments of the economy, ability to exploit these opportunities will be determined by relative economic power. Dantwala is today prepared to let holdings below 3 irrigated acres, large as the number of such holdings is, go to the wall as being unviable. This, he argues, is to be preferred to egalitarian stagnation. Let us accept the argument. But then why talk of "preventive land reform"? In a sense all the land reform that we have had since the abolition of zamindari has been of the preventive variety; none of it has changed the agrarian structure (witness the negligible area released for redistribution by ceiling laws in most States). Those who are so conscious of the adverse consequences of radical land reform should readily accept that there is no particular virtue in the present pattern of distribution of land either and that with changing technology this pattern could equally stand in the way of growth of production. The logic of the capitalist path in agriculture, let us face it, admits of no land reform