Abstract
The data of village and farm business surveys in India are too inaccurate to be of use in the analysis of the rural economy or the changes therein. This unsatisfactory nature of the data stems from the difference in outlook and interests of the cultivator and the investigator, the problem of memory, the problem of indifference in a context of hierarchical loyalties and conflicts, and the problem of motivation toward accurate replies on the part of the respondent when he has many reasons to mislead in many directions and few, if any, reasons to be conscientiously helpful. Some data, those which can be gathered by counting or by limited observation, are usable, but the gathering of quantitative data on farm operations will require a great effort over an extended period of time on a village at a time. Otherwise, the foreign scholar or visiting expert must restrict himself to employing the small amount of the bench-mark data as a base from which to work in constructing a description of the structure of aspects of the rural economy without hope of being able to employ quantitative methods on any but the most limited scale.
