Tenancy, Credit and Agrarian Backwardness-Results of a Field Survey

The findings of a survey of tenurial arrangements in Nadia district of West Bengal, reported here, reveal that tenurial arrangements were associated with backward production conditions. A typical tenant did not take up the new agricultural strategy; cost-sharing as an investment proposition was also missing from the pattern of behaviour of the landlords. A non-legalised sharecropping arrangement that assures a high share of the produce for the landowners, wielding semi-feudal authority over the tenants in a near stagnant agrarian economy, is the typical reality with respect to the observed house- holds. No neat model on the lines of differential risk aversion, or varying bargaining power of individual lessors and lessees, seems to he applicable to such an economy.