POST INDEPENDENCE LAND REFORMS IN
INDIA
2 phases of land reforms in
post-independence India:
1. 1947-early 1960s; the
phase of institutional reforms: abolition of
intermediaries like zamindars; tenancy reforms); land ceilings, and
cooperativization and community development programmes. These were aimed at
creating progressive cultivators who would make investments and improve
productivity
2. Mid-1960 onwards; phase of
technological reforms: green revolution etc.
Impact of land reforms:
·
Large, semi-feudal, rapacious
landlords rack-renting the peasantry as well as extracting illegal cesses in
cash, kind, or begari labor became a thing of the past
·
Burden of land revenue became near
zero, as the government stopped taxing agricultural income. The state, instead
of extracting agricultural surplus, now made massive efforts towards improving
agricultural productivity
·
Led to the creation of
progressive farmers (instead of absentee landlords), who had the motivation and
incentive for aiming towards improvements in agricultural productivity
·
During the first 3 FYPs (till
1964), agriculture grew at about 3% p.a. (between 1891 and 1946, the average
annual growth rate was only 0.4%)
·
Self-cultivation became the
predominant form of cultivation in most parts of the country
Zamindari abolition
Shortly after independence, land tenure
legislations were introduced by various state legislatures. However, following
problems:
·
Land records were not available
in most places
·
Tenancy was, in many places,
oral and unrecorded. It was very difficult to secure the land rights for such
tenants
·
Zamindars all over the place
challenged the constitutionality of the law, and generally, given their
political connections, resorted to parliamentary obstructionism
·
Even after laws were enacted,
the zamindars co-opted the lower level revenue officials and parts of the
judiciary to nullify the actual implementation of the law
·
In some places, zamindars were
allowed to retain lands that were declared to be under their ‘personal cultivation’,
with the phrase loosely defined. This made zamindars resort to mass evictions
of tenants to retain their lands
Nevertheless, by 1956, zamindari abolition was completed to a considerable extent.
This meant that about 20 million
erstwhile tenants now became landlords, and the compensation paid to he
zamindars was generally small. The chief losers were the big landlords, and
the main beneficiaries were upper tenants who had direct leases from the
landlords. These middle/ rich peasants had in turn let out their lands on
sub-leases to lower tenants with little rights, and their position was largely
unaffected.
Tenancy reforms
Even after the abolition of zamindari in
large parts, problems persisted because of bad land records, because zamindars
were allowed to retain ‘personally cultivated’ lands, and also because upper
tenants who now became landlords still had lower ‘tenants at will’ under them. The
next phase of reforms, thus, focused on tenancy legislation, which had three
objectives:
·
Guarantee security of tenure to peasants
who had cultivated a piece of land for a certain number of years
·
Reduction of rents
·
Tenants were to be given
ownership rights subject to certain conditions
Compensation to be paid to landlords by
tenants in return for this was supposed to be low, at around 40% of the market
value of the land.
Tenancy legislation by and large sought to strike a balance between the
rights of landowners and tenants:
·
Ceilings were introduced on
land that could be retained for ‘personal cultivation’, as this was being used
for mass evictions, generally by threatening the peasants into ‘voluntarily’
giving up their lands. The ‘surplus’ land beyond the ceiling was redistributed
amongst landless laborers
·
Tenants’ right to acquire the
landowner’s land was restricted by the condition that the landowner was not to
be deprived of his entire land (floors), and land ceilings applied to the new
landowners (erstwhile tenants) as well
Weaknesses:
·
In many places, tenancy was
cleverly hidden; tenants were now called ‘farm servants’
·
Tenants were often converted to sharecroppers (the distinction being that tenants paid in cash, while sharecroppers
paid a part of the produce, either fixed or a %)
·
The system couldn’t find ways
to get around the fact that most tenancies were oral and unrecorded
Operation Barga in West Bengal:
·
Introduced in 1978 to achieve time-bound registration
of sharecroppers so that they could be given legal rights
·
An effort was made to mobilize
the support of the rural poor and especially the targeted beneficiaries, and
co-opting of the lower revenue officials
·
Initially, the response was
pretty good, but the process more or less reached a stalemate after about half the
sharecroppers were registered, largely because of the need to balance the needs
of the small landowners and their tenants. It was politically unviable to
secure tenancy rights in cases where the landholdings were small, and the
landowner only got a small share of the produce as rent
·
The other problem was that the
land-man ratio in Bengal was so bad that landlords were often able to rotate
the same land between multiple sharecroppers, none of whom could be recognized
as the sole tenants
Thus,
the aim of providing security of tenure to all tenants met with only limited
success. This made the achievement of second
objective, that of reducing rents to a fair level, largely impossible.
Biggest
success of zamindari abolition, land ceilings, and
tenancy regulations was that tenants and sharecroppers who got occupancy rights
and paid fixed rents, tenants who acquired ownership rights, landless who got
‘surplus’ land, and absentee landowners who became private cultivators, all had the motivation to becoming progressive
farmers who could access credit and improve land productivity based on
judicious investments.
Land Ceilings
The issue of coming up with land ceilings
was constantly in public discourse since independence. However, not much progress
was made till the INC Nagpur resolution of January 1959, which stated that ceilings
should be fixed and associated legislations passed in the states by the end of
1959. This contributed considerably to the consolidation of right-wing forces.
The
ceiling laws that were subsequently enacted in most states by 1961 suffered
from a number of weaknesses:
·
Ceilings fixed by states were
very high
·
Initially, in most states, the
ceilings were imposed on individuals, and not on families
·
Many states made provisions to
raise the announced ceilings in case the landowner’s family had more than five people
·
A large number of exceptions
were permitted, usually for lands that could be demonstrated to be under
capitalist farming (tea, coffee, rubber plantations, specialized farms for
cattle breeding dairying etc.). This sometimes led to landlords creating bogus farming cooperatives in order to
shield themselves from the ceilings
·
The long delay since
independence in introducing ceiling legislations had anyway given much time to
the landlords to sell their excess lands, make malafide benami transfers etc.
Thus, by the time legislations came into place, there was very little land left
that was above the ceilings
The overall result was that even though
most states introduced legislations in 1961, as late as 1970 the total
area redistributed was a mere 0.3% of the total cultivated area in India.
However, the 1960s overall proved to be a tumultuous decade, with inflation,
devaluation, war with Pakistan, food crisis etc., and led to agrarian radicalism in large parts of
the country (Naxalism started). This
gave a further impetus to pro land-ceiling activists, and a second wave of
reforms was introduced. The Congress government, in 1972, issued a series of guidelines, which
mark a break in the history of land ceiling legislations in India:
·
Ceilings were brought down
·
Ceilings were made applicable
to a family unit of five people, rather than to individuals
·
In the redistribution of land,
priority was now to be given to landless agricultural laborers
Following these guidelines, most states revised
their ceiling legislations. Even now, landlords tried evading the new
legislation by seeking judicial review on various grounds. In an attempt to
stop this, the government passed the 34th
amendment to the constitution, getting most of the revised ceiling laws
included in the 9th schedule of the constitution, so that they
could not be challenged on constitutional grounds.
These revised legislations did lead to some
surplus land being redistributed, but the results were still not much to speak
of. While there was some improvement, land amounting to only about 2% of the cultivated
area was distributed.
The
most important effect of the land ceiling
legislations in India was that they killed the land market and prevented an
increasing concentration in landholdings through de-peasantization.
Current
situation:
·
Over time, the high population
growth and subdivision of land over many generations has automatically left
little land above the land ceiling limits. Except in certain small pockets
of the country, very large landholdings of the feudal type are a thing of the
past
·
Landowners have only consolidated
their political power
·
In any case, further reduction
of ceilings to provide land for landless laborers would vastly increase the
number of uneconomic and unviable holdings
·
Thus, other answers are to be
found in off-farm employment, increase in animal husbandry, and other
activities that do not require land
Bhoodan
and Gramdan movements:
·
Initiated by Gandhian Acharya
Vinoba Bhave in early 1950s
·
Him and his followers did padyatras
to persuade the large landowners to donate at least 1/6th of their
lands as ‘bhoodan’ for distribution among the landless and the poor
·
Target was to reach 50 million
acres
In its initial years, the movement achieved
considerable success, receiving over 4 million acres of land by 1956. After
this, it lost steam, and very little new land was received as donations. Also, a substantial part of the donated land
was either unfit for cultivation or under litigation.
Towards the end of 1955, the movement
changed tack, and initiated ‘Gramdan’, or
village donations:
·
Started in Orissa, and was most
successful there
·
The movement was successful mainly in villages where class
differentiation had not yet emerged, and there was little disparity in ownership
of land or other property, such as in some tribal community villages
By the end of the 1960s, the movements had
lost their élan, despite considerable initial promise. However, some successes:
·
Bhoodan/ Gramdan was one of
the very first attempts to bring about land reform via social movement and not
via legislation
·
It stimulated political
activity by peasant masses and created a favorable atmosphere for political
propaganda and agitation for redistribution of the land
Cooperatives and an Overview of Land Reforms
At independence, given the socialist ideas
of many of the nationalist leaders, cooperativization was high on the agenda,
and was expected to serve as a major boost to agricultural productivity and
growth. However, it was clarified that any move towards cooperativization would
be through persuasion, and not compulsion. India officials were urged by Nehru
to learn from the Chinese example.
The
states, however, resisted any large-scale plans for cooperativization, agreeing
only to strictly voluntary experiments in cooperative farming. Nothing much happened for over a decade after independence; tired
at the slow pace of reforms, the Nagpur Resolution (1958) of the INC sought to
bring cooperativization back on the reform agenda, and issued declarations
about the same. This was followed by a wave of opposition, both from within and
outside the INC. In any case, after the
war with China in 1962, cooperativization following the Chinese example fell
out of favor.
Whatever cooperatives were set up largely
fell under one of two categories:
-
Cooperatives that were made by
declaring tenants as bogus members to evade land reforms, and
-
State-sponsored pilot projects
(which ended up suffering from poor quality of land, lack of proper irrigation
facility, and bureaucratization)
However, one other type of cooperatives
were generally looked favorably upon, and these contributed significantly to
agricultural growth: these were service
cooperatives, that provided institutional credit, subsidized fertilizers
and modern implements, farmers education etc. Their successes are as follows:
·
In 1951, about 93% of all farm
credit came from informal sources; in 1981, 63% was institutional, with about
30% from credit cooperatives
·
Increased accessibility to new
techniques and tools to improve productivity
The major drawback of credit cooperatives
was their failure to repay loans in many cases.
Comments
Post a Comment