please read it and write a good summary what did you understand A Land Revenue Commission set up for East Pakistan in 1958 led to an amendment of the East Bengal State Acquisition and Tenancy Act 1950 by which I was able to raise the ceiling of khas (self-cultivated) land from 33 acres to about 120 acres or so. With 120 acres in East Pakistan, one can have adequate production If one is prepared to work. The land is fertile and responsive. Under the same amendment, the limits of 'subsistence' and 'economic' holdings in East Pakistan were fixed at three acres and eight acres, respectively. Meanwhile, I had been pressing the East Pakistan Government to get the land records made as quickly as possible and start giving compensation to the landlords from whom land was resumed. They had to have something with which to start life afresh and become useful members of society. Some people have asked me whether mechanization of agriculture and use of improved fertilizers and better seeds could not have been achieved through cooperative fanning. We have found from experience that cooperative fanning does not work in our social system; it can succeed only under a Communist system. The Indians are experimenting with cooperatives. They have split up the holdings to 30 acres each: the results have been dismal. You cannot get results through cooperatives in conditions comparable to ours unless there is a measure of compulsion. And this notion that everybody must own land just does not make sense. We do not have enough land to give to everybody. You can broaden the base of ownership but you must have a class of people interested in investing in land and working on it on a sound economic and progressive basis. If you destroy this class you are just killing the goose. About 60 percent of Pakistan's income comes from land. Under our land reforms, landlords, by tradition a lazy people, are working harder on the land and are getting far more out of it. They have introduced mechanization, fertilizers, and better seeds, A whole class of young people after finishing college are going back to the land. All this makes for a healthy agricultural community. It is not easy to encourage investment in agriculture. In the dry areas land revenue is fixed, but in the canal areas in Sindh, the amount of revenue fluctuates with the type of crop and the prices. In other words, a man who works harder and produces more has to pay more taxes to the government! The West Pakistan government is now considering a system under which it can have a fixed land revenue. Once that is done the farmer will be encouraged to get the maximum out of his land. Cooperatives can be useful in Pakistan, but in the field of common credit facilities. I should like to see finance cooperatives started in every Union Council, to take the place of the village moneylender who has, fortunately, disappeared; but the void left by him has not been filled. Rural credit facilities are a problem. The answer really is that the Union Councils should establish their own savings accounts and cooperative arrangements. The democratic content of the new Constitution would have been a sham without the land reforms. Ask a farmer whose family has been tilling a plot of land for generations how these reforms have changed his whole attitude towards life. He sweated and toiled, as did his fore-fathers, but neither they nor he could claim that plot of land as his own. The land reforms have changed his destiny: he is now likely to be the proud owner of his land. The pattern of our social and political life is being transformed. Governments who maneuvered themselves into power on the strength of their vast estates will no longer be able to stage a come-back. Leadership will now be judged not in terms of acres of land but by social and human values. The curtain has been rung down on the dismal interplay of extreme poverty and excessive wealth which had long dominated the rural scene. A good deal of what I planned to do was going to affect the lives of powerful people in the country as well as the masses. They all had to be clear in their minds about the necessity for the change, so that once it was made, although it might prove distasteful in the beginning, it would have their support and they would try to sustain it in future. In that. I think, I succeeded to a large extent. All reforms hurt vested interests and most of my reforms were directed against vested interests. Six thousand powerful and lords in West Pakistan lost through the land reforms about 27 million acres or land. Murders are committed over an inch of land: here were near three million acres given up without a squeak