The profit in capitalist agriculture can be derived from three sources: a) greater productivity of land: b) a protected market and c) a depressed wage level which can originate from surplus wage labour or from a sizeable poor peasantry. Since India can be characterized in terms of the last alternative, the development along classical lines is to that extent complicated. Further complications are introduced by the fact that the agrarian ownership structure can be controlled and manipulated politically. The possibility of reproducing these conditions for capitalist development depends, then, on the political representation of the agrarian bourgeoisie, and its alliances with other classes.

The recent debate on the mode of production in Indian agriculture also attempted to explore the ‘point of domination’ of capitalist social relation in agrarian structures where the development of commodity relations occurred under colonialism. However this debate still remains open since “none of the authors give the criteria for deciding when commodity production has ceased to be a peripheral activity within a mode of production and becomes instead the general form of production. The generalization of commodity production if taken as the necessary and sufficient condition for the development of capitalist relations will mean that labour power and the means of production be separated and circulate as commodities. But the development towards generalized commodity production can be seen as a historical process towards a continuum. This presents major difficulties in characterizing agrarian transition because the point at which conditions of capitalist production come into existence is not easy to locate. One suggested way out of this impasse is to determine the ‘point of domination’ by analysing the process of social differentiation and the development of the home market.