under-report size of holdings and extent of tenancy and to over-report the crop share of tenants". Village studies report more land under tenancy than does the NSS, and show a smaller excess of reported leased-in over leased-out land (Jayaraman and Lanjouw 1998). Aside from questionable accuracy owing to reporting biases, survey data tend to overstate land inequality and need to be corrected for household size and land quality. Households with smaller holdings also tend to have fewer members, which relates in part to the lifecycle effect of subdivision upon inheritance. Smaller holdings tend to be cropped more intensively and have a higher percentage of total area under irrigation. Inequality in income potential is therefore reduced within a given region than the aggregate data suggest, while differences in agro-ecological potential mean comparisons between regions are also suspect.

Data on landlessness need to be interpreted with care. There are four main definitions: households owning no land, those who operate no land, those who neither own nor operate any land, and rural households who rely principally on wage employment. These categories typically overlap but are not identical; the differences are important with respect to control over assets and livelihood sources, and in terms of their policy implications. It is important to distinguish underlying causes of landlessness in terms of push factors (demographic pressure inducing some marginal landowners to lease out or sell their land, distress sales owing to indebtedness or other contingencies, ejection of tenants to evade provisions of tenancy acts or to allow landlords to resume self-cultivation using new technology), or pull factors (growth in non-farm employment opportunities). Some (e.g. Singh 1990) suggest that the growth in landlessness during the 1970s in agriculturally progressive states (Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat) is no cause for alarm on the grounds that it merely reflects the growing dynamism of the rural non-farm sector.

The aggregate data also fail to offer insights into the operation of land markets. Land transfers come about through subdivision (legal and customary), gifts (usually within families, see Rosenzweig and Wolpin 1985), sales, and redistribution under land reform legislation, but these are difficult to distinguish in aggregate data. To understand land transactions fully, longitudinal village studies are required, tracing who transfers land to whom, why, and on what terms, informed by local histories of changing agrarian conditions (Jayaraman and Lanjouw 1998).

# **SIZE DISTRIBUTION OF RURAL LAND HOLDINGS**

Gross inequities in land ownership in rural India have persisted since independence in spite of the tendency for population pressure to bring about a more even distribution of holdings<sup>14</sup> . But this should not divert attention from the important structural changes that have taken place: the number of small/marginal owners, the total area they owned, and the average size of their holdings have increased, while the importance of large farms has decreased. The number and proportion of households owning no land has declined significantly since independence,

- 13 Indian data, however, are generally believed to be better than those for other South Asian countries (Singh 1990).

> 4 Besley and Burgess (1998) found that the gini coefficient for land distribution declined from 0.686 in 1953/54 to just 0.669 in 1982, even in 'high land reform' states. This places India in the middle range of land inequality by international standards. Latin American countries generally have much higher land inequality (Deininger and Squire 1996).

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