on average, 93% of sample households are male-headed, with a head 52 years old. Most land (71%) is under irrigation and the mean value of non-land assets is Rs 323,000, equivalent to some USD 7,100 at the exchange rate prevailing then. Key categories of non-land assets are buildings (46%), financial assets (23%), agricultural implements and producer durables (11% and 10%, respectively), and livestock as well as non-agricultural business for the remainder. Mean total household income is Rs. 105,862, equal to US$ 2,341, equivalent to per capita income of US$ 410. Major income sources are crops (55%), transfers (14%), non-farm self-employment (12%), salary and wages (13%), and livestock (7%).

A number of further observations are noteworthy. With a Gini for per capita assets of 0.650 and for income of 0.579, inequality remains high. Small farmers’ income is very low, not because their income sources are insufficiently diversified or they are unproductive but because their land endowment is small. The share of income from crops is highly ( _ρ=_ 0.7269) and significantly correlated with farm size; crop income comprises only about one-fourth (27%) of the total for small farmers compared to about threefourths (74%) for large ones. Legal prohibitions on land leasing together with outdated land ownership records in most states also imply that land markets are very inactive: the Gini for owned land (0.543) is almost equal to that for operated land (0.537). Finally, the correlation between levels of fragmentation and mean distances between parcels is weak ( _ρ=_ 0.0725) and insignificant.

With total output per household at Rs. 21,240 (US$ 469.83), about half of which goes to variable inputs including labor, net profit amounts to some Rs. 10,500/ac. At a cost share of about one-third, labor is a main cost component, followed by seed (17%), inorganic and organic fertilizers (15 and 11%), machinery (10%), and minor categories such as pesticides (4%), irrigation (4%), bullocks (3%) and miscellaneous others (3%). With 37% of area planted, paddy is the main crop, followed by wheat (19%), bajra, pulses, and oilseeds (7% each), other cereals (6%), and any others such as fruits and vegetables (12%).

Productivity, in terms of output per acre decreases with farm size from Rs. 23,000 for small to Rs. 19,500 for large farms. This is in line with the inverse relationship between output and farm size long observed by Indian scholars. But if family labor is valued at market wages, a positive relationship emerges between farm size and profits per acre (Rs. 9.029; 10,674, and 12,629) suggesting that labor market imperfections could underlie some of the observed relationship, similar to what is observed in Rwanda (Ali and Deininger 2013).<sup>10</sup> Cost shares for key inputs differ by farm size: while all size groups devote some 7% of cost to hired labor, small farms’ spending on labor is about double that of large farms (32% vs. 16%), suggesting more labor-intensive ways of cultivation. At the same time, large farms spend 45% of the total on seed, fertilizer,

> of the parcels they cultivate, the majority of the remainder (3,814 farms or 80% of the entire sample) and values for most of the variables are not significantly different from those for the total sample.

> 10 Note that gross margins, i.e. output net of variable inputs excluding labor is, with Rs. 13,527, 12,997, and 13,802, almost identical across the three farm size groups.

10