“Economics of Share -Cropping in Haryana (India) Agriculture” – A Comment

Economic efficiency of agriculture in developing countries has been a matter of great interest among the development economists and has received considerable attention in the literature on agricultural development. The increasing access to electronic computers and availability of farm management data have provided further impetus to the empirical analysis and comparison of economic efficiency among well-defined farm groups and a rich body of literature on the subject appeared during the Sixties and Seventies [2; 3; 4; 6; 7; 8; 10; 11; 12;!3; 14 and 15] . “Economics of Share Cropping in Haryana (India) Agriculture” by F. S. Bagi, published in the Spring 1981 issue of this Review [I], is a recent contribution to the literature dealing with economic efficiency of agriculture. Analysing data from a survey of 119 farms from Haryana (India), the author concludes that technical efficiency of the share-cropping farms is lower and there is Significant allocative inefficiency on share-cropping and owner-operated farms. The contribution, though analysing an important issue of Haryana agriculture, however, suffers from some serious methodological problems and faulty interpretation of some of the empirical results. The 119 survey farms on which Bagi’s analysis is based, had the following irrigation pattern: 20 farms fully irrigated, 17 farms totally unirrigated and remaining 82 farms partly irrigated. It is not clear from the study how the sample farms were selected, what sampling procedure was followed in choosing these farms, and how closely the “Sample farm groups” represented the actual farming situation in Haryana. Therefore, one does not know whether the results can be generalised to Haryana situation or not.