#KanakaDasa

“When an Indian farmer today pulls his land record from the patwari's office, he is holding the end of a paper trail designed by Akbar's finance minister — a machine that outlived the Mughals, the Marathas and the British Raj, and is still running.”

“A state can tax justly only what it has honestly measured. Survey every field with an instrument that cannot stretch, classify the soil, average ten years of yields and prices, fix the demand in cash that the peasant knows before he sows, and file every transaction — government as an archive.”