248 DEAFT BILL AND SHOET STATEMENT 



Statement of Objects and Reasons. 



1. It has long been a subject of comment in India that the 

 land-holdings of cultivators have become subdivided up to 

 a point at which they are now, in many localities, very small, 

 and that the holdings, whether large or small, are frequently 

 "fragmented" in a manner which is very prejudicial to 

 effective cultivation. This progressive process of subdivision 

 and fragmentation is due to the increase of population and 

 to the fact that the laws of inheritance which are in force in 

 this country operate in such a way as to give to each male 

 member of a land-holder's family a share in the family land. 



2. The same causes have produced precisely the same 

 results in other countries, though in hardly any other 

 country has the process been pushed so far. In many other 

 countries legislation has been undertaken to remedy this 

 state of affairs and has been found to be effective, resulting 

 in an increase in the outturn of agricultural produce and a 

 decrease in the cost of production. Such legislation has 

 come to be recognised, even in countries where at first it 

 met with much opposition, as altogether favourable to eco- 

 nomic progress and to the production of increased wealth. 

 The lines on which legislation has usually proceeded have 

 been the compulsory and voluntary consolidation of holdings 

 coupled with the provision that holdings once consolidated 

 may not afterwards be subdivided. 



3. In the Bombay Presidency in general, and in particular 

 in the Konkan, West Deccan and the garden and rice tracts 

 of Gujarat, subdivision and fragmentation of land have 

 reached an intolerable point. Over large tracts the average 

 size of the holding is only two or three acres, while fields 

 measuring less than half an acre are found to be subdivided 

 into more than twenty separately owned plots, many of them 

 of less than one guntha (^th of an acre) apiece. The process 

 of subdivision and fragmentation is continuously going on, 

 both in tracts where the situation is already acute and in 



