Akbar's efforts to develop a revenue schedule…

Akbar's efforts to develop a revenue schedule both convenient to the peasants and sufficiently profitable to the state have taken some two decades to implement.

He had in  1580 obtained the previous ten years' local revenue statistics, detailing productivity and price fluctuations, and averaged the produce of different crops and their prices.

He also has evolved a permanent schedule circle by grouping together the districts having homogeneous agricultural conditions.

For measuring land area, he has abandoned the use of hemp rope in favor of a more definitive method using lengths of bamboo joined with iron rings.

Developed largely under the supervision of his famed Hindu minister Todar Mal., Akbar’s administration fixes the revenue according to the continuity of cultivation and quality of soil, which ranges from one-third to one-half of production value and is payable in copper coin (dams).

The peasants thus have to enter the market and sell their produce in order to meet the assessment.

This system, called zabt, applies in North India and ...