average, there are about 7.5 plots per holding in 93 villages in the four tehsils for which data was made available. The averages mask wide variations in the extent of 'scatteredness', however. In Talab village of Rengali tehsil, for example, there were 14.5 plots per holding prior to the start of the land consolidation operation.

A total of 146 villages falling under six police stations were taken up for consolidation after the promulgation of the OCH & PFL Act, 1972. One village failed to satisfy the minimum conditions for consolidation to proceed, and landowners in a further eight villages failed to cooperate with the proposals for land reallocation following the preparation and publication of the land register. As a result, consolidation operation in these 8 villages had to be called off. At the time of our survey, land consolidation had been completed in 134 of the remaining 137 villages, and is ongoing in three villages.

Of the 134 villages in which the operation had been completed and _pattas_ distributed, however, landowners in 47 villages (35 percent) have refused to take possession of the new holdings, since they are unwilling to undertake the large-scale exchange of plots that would be required to effect the consolidation process. Some of these villages are located at the tail-end of the Hirakud irrigation system where there is considerable fluctuation in water availability. It appears that landowners do not have confidence in the way the proposals were prepared in practice, and fear that the method adopted has not adequately taken account of variations in land quality (see Box 10 for a more detailed village case study). In spite of the undulating terrain and widely varying soil types, 75 percent of landowners have been allotted land in a single compact block (chak), and 20 percent in just two chaks. Only five percent households have been allotted land in three chaks. Diversification of holdings across land types is regarded by local farmers as essential under the prevailing cropping systems. It is suggested by informed observers that such conditions, accounting for much of the local resistance to land consolidation, are typical of the hilly tracts of westem Orissa.

# _4.2.5 Resistance to consolidation_

In summary, resistance to consolidation may arise from:

- _predominance ofpaddy:_ In undulating tracts, paddy is grown on terraced fields which need to be flat and require a bund to retain water. It is obviously easier to level and maintain smaller plots than one large fragment. Further, given the labour-intensive nature of paddy cultivation, the farming efficiency of small fields can be high, given the low opportunity cost of family labour in circumstances of limited non-farm employment potential;

- _variability in soil types:_ As the case study from Sambalpur highlights, there can be a sizeable variation in output per plot due to soil quality and farmers with plots in fertile and well-drained soils are reluctant to exchange them for fewer fragments on poorer soils;

- _need to spread labour:_ Diversification between plots reduce peaks in labour demand throughout the year, on the expectation that crops in different plots may be at different stages in the cropping cycle at any given time. This explanation is less plausible where cropping cycles vary little between plots, and with use of modem seed varieties and irrigation;

- _risk aversion:_ This seems a valid reason for persistence of fragmentation in unirrigated tracts where different soils have different moisture-retention capacities. Holding a diversified portfolio of land parcels can enable the farner to minimise the risk of low yields in the worst years;

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