tell us even the number of children in their families, with-
out a series of cross-questions.

With regard to the second group, absence of accounts
was certainly a great difficulty. Though some family-
heads could supply us with very rough estimates of ex-
penditure, the majority could not with any approach to
accuracy. In their case, too, we were forced to adopt a
standard budget for all castes taken as an aggregate.

In the case of exceptional families, which form the third
group, we were fortunate in getting fairly reliable estimat-
es of expenditure on diiferent items from the heads of nine
families, and estimates of total expenditure only, without
the details of different items, from the remaining three.

We shall now turn to a detailed discussion of the stan-
dard of living of these three groups. In the case of the
first two we shall describe how we have constructed the
standard budget, and in the case of the third wer shall make
only a few remarks about their standard as seen from the
estimates of expenditure supplied to us.

THE STANDARD BUDGET ADOPTED FOR THE
KALIPARAJ
We shall describe in a general manner the method of
constructing a standard budget for a group. It may be
noted that even in this case there are two ways of con-
structing a standard budget. One is to collect a few
normal budgets from some intelligent members of the
group and then deduce the expenditure therefrom for an
average family. This method mostly resembles the
family-budget method. The second way is to construct
at first hand a budget of normal expenses incurred by the
average family of the group on different items after a free
consultation with the people. We have combined the
two. We collected a few weekly budgets from some in-
telligent members of this group and ascertained the nature
of their dietary. We subsequently proceeded to construct