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LAND REFORMS

LAND REFORMS

Pre Independence

• Under the British Raj, the farmers did not have the ownership of the lands they cultivated, the landlordship of the land lied with the Zamindars, Jagirdars etc.
• Several important issues confronted the government and stood as a challenge in front of independent India.
• Land was concentrated in the hands of a few and there was a proliferation of intermediaries who had no vested interest in self-cultivation.
• Leasing out land was a common practice.
• The tenancy contracts were expropriative in nature and tenant exploitation was almost everywhere.
• Land records were in extremely bad shape giving rise to a mass of litigation.
• One problem of agriculture was that the land was fragmented into very small parts l for commercial farming.
• It resulted in inefficient use of soil, capital, and labour in the form of boundary lands and boundary disputes.

Post Independence

• A committee, under the Chairmanship of J. C. Kumarappan was appointed to look into the problem of land. The Kumarappa Committee's report recommended comprehensive agrarian reform measures.
• The Land Reforms of the independent India had four components:
  • The Abolition of the Intermediaries
  • Tenancy Reforms
  • Fixing Ceilings on Landholdings
  • Consolidation of Landholdings.
• These were taken in phases because of the need to establish a political will for their wider acceptance of these reforms.

Advantages

• The abolition of intermediaries made almost 2 crore tenants the owners of the land they cultivated.
• The abolition of intermediaries has led to the end of a parasite class. More lands have been brought to government possession for distribution to landless farmers.
• A considerable area of cultivable waste land and private forests belonging to the intermediaries has been vested in the State.
• The legal abolition brought the cultivators in direct contact with the government.

Disadvantages:

• However, zamindari abolition did not wipe out landlordism or the tenancy or sharecropping systems, which continued in many areas. It only removed the top layer of landlords in the multi-layered agrarian structure.
• It has led to large-scale eviction. Large-scale eviction, in turn, has given rise to several problems – social, economic, administrative and legal.

Tenancy Reforms

• After passing the Zamindari Abolition Acts, the next major problem was of tenancy regulation.
• The rent paid by the tenants during the pre-independence period was exorbitant; between 35% and 75% of gross produce throughout India.
• Tenancy reforms introduced to regulate rent, provide security of tenure and confer ownership to tenants.
• With the enactment of legislation (early 1950s) for regulating the rent payable by the cultivators, fair rent was fixed at 20% to 25% of the gross produce level in all the states except Punjab, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Tamil Nadu, and some parts of Andhra Pradesh.
• The reform attempted either to outlaw tenancy altogether or to regulate rents to give some security to the tenants.
• In West Bengal and Kerala, there was a radical restructuring of the agrarian structure that gave land rights to the tenants.
• Issues: In most of the states, these laws were never implemented very effectively. Despite repeated emphasis in the plan documents, some states could not pass legislation to confer rights of ownership to tenants.
• Few states in India have completely abolished tenancy while others states have given clearly spelt out rights to recognized tenants and sharecroppers.
• Although the reforms reduced the areas under tenancy, they led to only a small percentage of tenants acquiring ownership rights.

Way Forward

• It has now been argued by the NITI Aayog and some sections of industry that land leasing should be adopted on a large scale to enable landholders with unviable holdings to lease out land for investment, thereby enabling greater income and employment generation in rural areas.
• This cause would be facilitated by the consolidation of landholdings.
• Modern land reforms measures such as land record digitisation must be accomplished at the earliest.

The pace of implementation of land reform measures has been slow. The objective of social justice has, however, been achieved to a considerable degree.  Land reform has a great role in the rural agrarian economy that is dominated by land and agriculture. New and innovative land reform measures should be adopted with new vigour to eradicate rural poverty.