rural India was lost to boundaries in 1957. Those who draw attention to the potential costs of fragmentation suggest that it could account for the loss of around 3-10 per cent of net returns to farming, although farm management studies based on field observations show that adaptive farming practices significantly reduce these potential costs in practice (Heston and Kumar 1983).

There are differing views on the real significance of fragmentation. Singh (1990), for example, believes it is a serious problem that warrants serious public policy attention in its own right, while others (Vaidyanathan 1994, Thangaraj 1995) point out that the process of fragmentation has been slowing considerably since the 1960s, particularly where land markets are more active and less regulated. While the number of plots per holding tends to increase with holding size, all-India data on operational holdings show that the average number of parcels per holding has declined from 5.7 in 1961-62 to 4.0 in 1982. Given the rate of population increase over this period (see table 2), this is quite a remarkable decline. However, given that total operated area has changed little, the average size of each of these parcels of land has also declined from 0.47 ha in 1961-62 to 0.41 ha in 1982. For operational holdings, there is evidence that land-lease markets enable farmers to overcome the effects of fragmentation (Ballabh and Walker 1992, Vaidyanathan 1994).

The chief cause of fragmentation by far is the subdivision of holdings on inheritance. As with other personal laws, different laws governing inheritance apply to different religious groups, but both Hindu and Muslim law provides for equal inheritance among sons as heirs. Since their reform after independence, Hindu personal laws also provide for inheritance by women, but social norms and customs tend overwhelmingly to prevail, and in practice women's legal rights in their parental land tend to pass to their brothers (Agarwal 1995). Various institutional mechanisms have tended to counteract the driving force of population growth and partible inheritance, most notably joint family arrangements. Other institutional rules have been important in dampening fragmentation in particular regions. For example, one system enforced until the 1940s in parts of the British Central Provinces stipulated that a farmer had to obtain a declaration certificate from each of his brothers before he could sell his land, and brothers had the first option on prospective land for sale. This practice, known as _agrah kriya_ ('on request') raised the cost of transacting land, and stimulated voluntary consolidation through the market (Ballabh and Walker 1992). Overall, in spite of the fact that joint family holdings have increasingly been divided in recent years, the rate of fragmentation has lagged significantly behind the rate of population increase.

Four main hypotheses have been advanced to explain the persistence of fragmentation: (i) **risk-spreading** is the most common: where soils are spatially heterogeneous or where there are other reasons for high variance in yields between plots, it makes sense to hold a diversified portfolio of land parcels to maintain higher net yields over time, and to minimize the risk of zero or very low yields in the worst years, thus reducing the risk of distress sales and indebtedness; (ii) **labor-spreading:** diversification between plots reduces peaks in labor 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 hypothesis is less plausible where cropping cycles vary little between plots within particular localities, as in paddy rice producing areas (South India, West Bengal); 23