harvested each year. It was apparently almost universal on wet land. Its drawbacks, as already mentioned, were that it involved the entertainment of a large native staff who cheated the Government and bullied the ryots.
Under the visabadi system, which was generally applied to dry land, the assessment on the village as a whole was fixed annually by the Collector with reference to the probable prospects of the harvest, but was frequently revised at the jamabandi in accordance with the actual state of the season. This lump assessment was distributed among the different fields by the ryots themselves, individual agreements being taken by the Collector from each ryot for the rent apportioned to his holding.
The fairness of this distribution was in theory maintained by the introduction of the peculiar system of 'challenging,' under which any ryot who considered that his own holding was over-assessed and that of his neighbour too leniently rated could demand that the latter should be made over to him at an increased rate which he named. If the ryot in possession consented to pay the enhanced demand he could retain the land, and in that case a proportionate reduction was made in the assessment of the fields held by the ryot who challenged. If, however, the ryot in possession refused to agree to the increased rate, he was compelled to give up the land to the challenger, who took it on the higher terms he had himself named.
This challenging necessarily rendered occupation insecure, and it moreover failed to meet every case of unfairness, since the unit of challenging was the entire holding and not a particular field; and a small ryot whose one or two fields were over-assessed could not afford to challenge a wealthy cultivator with a large holding, however sure he might be that the latter was too leniently rated. 'Accordingly,' wrote the Collector in 1825, 'the substantial ryots invariably contrived that their own lands should be lightly assessed and the burden thrown on those of the poorer ryots.'
This apportionment of the lump village assessment among the different holdings was made either annually or periodically. If the latter, it was generally accompanied by a redistribution of the fields among the various villagers every three, four or five years (according to the custom of each village), somewhat in the same way as under the karaiyídu form of the mirási tenure in Tanjore, of which relics even now survive. This was done chiefly to prevent the land held by the smaller ryots from being exhausted by continual poor farming, but
