Land Reforms: An Introduction

The post-independence Indian land programme has gone through several stages. There were numerous changes in the system of land taxation or revenue during the Mughal period, prior to the arrival of the British. Peasants retained their customary rights to the land they occupied, and could only be evicted if they failed to pay the state the required land revenue (land tax). A class of agents known as zamindars was tasked with collecting land revenue.

 

•    The agricultural structure underwent fundamental change when the East India Company (EIC) was founded in the seventeenth century. The EIC first purchased the right to receive the collected land revenue, and then, in 1793, the Permanent Settlement declared the Zamindars to be land proprietors in exchange for the payment of a fixed land revenue. 

•    Revenue collection was typically delegated to a series of middlemen by zamindars or those to whom they sold their proprietary rights. Because of the increased layers of intermediaries, the rent extracted from the tillers increased significantly, and failure to pay this increased amount resulted in large-scale evictions, widespread disruption, and declining agricultural production. The British attempted to bring order to the situation by enacting tenancy reform legislation.

 

•    Landlords' ability to raise rent or evict tenants was limited by the Bengal Rent Act of 1859. The Act, on the other hand, only protected fixed-rent tenants, not bargadars or agricultural labourers. However, it only protected fixed-rent tenants who could show they had cultivated the land for a period of 12 years in a row. 

 

•    Due to poor records, constant cultivation was difficult to prove, and the Act resulted in an increase in Zamindar evictions to prevent tenants from possessing land for the required time period. The Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 attempted to protect long-term tenants, but it was similarly ineffective. 

 

•    During this time, Bengal saw the emergence of a new type of landowner. The Jotedars were a wealthy class of peasants who reclaimed and took control of vast swaths of uncultivated forest and wetlands outside of the Permanent Settlement's jurisdiction. Some of this land was refined by the Jotedars through direct supervision of hired labour or servants. Nonetheless, Bargadars cultivated the majority of the Jotedars' land, as they did much of Bengal's land.

 

•    To redistribute land in order to create a socialistic society. Land ownership inequalities will be reduced as a result of this effort. 

 

•    Maintaining a land ceiling and removing surplus land for distribution to small and marginal farmers. 

 

•    The ceiling limit serves to legitimise tenancy. 

 

•    All tenancies must be registered with the village Panchayats.

 

•    To determine the relationship between the tenancy and the ceiling. 

 

•    To alleviate poverty in rural areas. 

 

•    Promoting socialist development in order to reduce social inequity 

 

•    Women's empowerment in a traditionally male-dominated society.

 

•    To boost agricultural productivity. 

 

•    To demonstrate that anyone can own a piece of land. 

 

•    Tribal protection by preventing outsiders from claiming their land.

 

After independence, there were basically two phases to the land reform process. The first phase, which began soon after independence and lasted until the early 1960s, focused on the following features: 

 

1)    Abolition of intermediaries such as zamindars and jagirdars, 

 

2)    Tenancy reforms such as providing tenants with security of tenure, lowering rents, and conferring ownership rights to tenants, 

 

3)    Landholding size ceilings, and 

 

4)    cooperativization and co-operatives. 

 

This period is also known as the period of institutional reforms. The second phase, which began around the mid- or late 1960s, saw the gradual implementation of the so-called Green Revolution and has been referred to as the technological reform phase. It is not necessary to separate the two phases into rigid, watertight compartments. In fact, they were complementary to one another, and the programmes followed during these phases had a fair amount of overlap.

 

•    Zamindari abolition bills or land tenure legislation were introduced in a number of provinces within a year or two of independence, namely Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Madras, Assam, and Bombay, with the report of the U.P. Zamindari Abolition Committee (chaired by G.B. Pant) serving as the initial model for many others. 

 

•    In the meantime, India's Constitution was being drafted by the Constituent Assembly. There was, however, widespread concern, including among Congress leaders committed to zamindari abolition such as Jawaharlal Nehru, G.B. Pant, and Sardar Patel, that the zamindars would try to stymie the acquisition of their estates by taking legal action, citing issues such as a violation of the right to property or the compensation being "unjust." 

 

•    The relevant provisions of the Constitution were framed in such a way that the leaders felt confident that the zamindari abolition bills pending in the state legislatures would pass on the basis of compensation recommended by the state legislatures, as these recommendations were made non-justiciable, requiring only presidential assent, which meant ultimately the support of the state legislatures. 

 

•    From the tenants' perspective, the compensation recommended by the legislatures was expected to be small and reasonable. It is significant that there was broad agreement to give legislatures the authority to prescribe compensation principles in the event of zamindar expropriation. Commercial and industrial property acquisitions continued to necessitate a different set of guidelines.

 

•    However, zamindars in various parts of the country challenged the constitutionality of the law permitting zamindari abolition, and courts, such as the Patna High Court, upheld the landlords' suit, contrary to the expectations of the Constitution's framers. 

 

•    The 1st Amendment, ratified in 1951, and the 4th Amendment, ratified in 1955, were intended to strengthen state legislatures' hands in enacting zamindari abolition by prohibiting courts from hearing claims of violation of any fundamental right or inadequacy of compensation. 

 

•    Even though the zamindars continued to file numerous appeals in the High Court and Supreme Court, if only to delay the acquisition of their estates, by the mid-fifties, the back of their resistance had been broken. It should be emphasized that, contrary to popular belief, the framers of the Constitution, including the so-called "right wing," were not attempting to stymie land reforms, but rather were attempting to complete the process within a democratic framework.

 

•    The lack of adequate land records posed a major challenge in implementing the zamindari abolition acts, which had been passed in most provinces by 1956.

 

•    Nonetheless, the process of land reform involving the abolition of intermediaries (the zamindars of British India and jagirdars of princely states now merged with independent India) can be said to have been completed by the end of the 1950s (though essentially by 1956). 

 

•    Given that the entire process took place in a democratic environment with little to no coercion or violence, it was completed in a remarkably short time. This was made possible in part because the zamindars as a class had been socially isolated during the national movement due to their association with the imperialist camp.

 

•    Reforms that jeopardized the interests of sections of the upper peasantry who were deeply involved in the national movement and enjoyed widespread societal support, on the other hand, were far more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

 

•    With the abolition of zamindari, approximately twenty million former tenants became landowners. The figures for area and number of tenancies are highly unreliable, partly because a large proportion of tenancies in many areas were ‘oral' and thus unrecorded. 

 

•    Scholars agree, however, that tenancy declined after the reforms began, with one rough estimate estimating that the area under tenancy fell from about 42 percent in 1950-51 to between 20 and 25 percent by the early 1960s. However, as we will see later, the decline in tenancy and significant increase in self-cultivation was caused not only by tenants becoming landowners, but also by landowners evicting existing tenants.

 

•    The actual compensation paid to the zamindars after their estates were acquired was typically small and varied from state to state depending on the strength of the peasant movement and the resulting class balance between landlords and tenants, as well as the ideological makeup of the Congress leadership and the legislature as a whole. No compensation was paid in Kashmir, for example. 

 

•    The Patiala occupancy tenants were paid nothing, and even the inferior tenants were given a pittance, often just the first instalment of the total compensation to be paid over a number of years. Most states adopted a variant of the model developed in Uttar Pradesh, in which the compensation paid was inversely proportional to the size of the land under a zamindar's control. 

 

•    However, there were some significant flaws in the way that some of the zamindari abolition clauses were implemented in different parts of the country. In Uttar Pradesh, for example, zamindars were allowed to keep lands that were declared to be under their "personal cultivation." ‘(making) it possible for not only those who tilled the soil, but also those who supervised the land personally or through a relative, or provided capital and credit to the land, to call themselves a cultivator,' was the loose definition of ‘personal cultivation.' 

 

•    Furthermore, there was no limit on the size of the lands that could be declared to be under the ‘personal cultivation' of the zamindar in states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Madras at first (i.e., before land ceiling laws were introduced). 

 

•    Despite the fact that the Congress Agrarian Reforms Committee (Kumarappa Committee) stated in its 1949 report that "only those who put in a minimum amount of physical labour and participate in actual agricultural operations" could be considered "personal cultivators." In addition, the committee had envisioned a limit or ceiling on how much land could be "resumed" for "personal cultivation," with no tenant's holding falling below the "economic" level.

 

•    In practice, this meant that even zamindars who were previously absentee landowners could now keep large tracts of land. Furthermore, in many areas, zamindars resorted to large-scale evictions of tenants, primarily the less secure small tenants, in order to declare as much of their lands as possible under ‘personal cultivation.' 

 

•    Many of the previously largely rent-receiving zamindars, on the other hand, began to manage the lands declared under their "personal cultivation." They invested in them and moved forward with progressive capitalist farming in these areas, which was one of the land reform's goals. 

 

•    Landlords tried to avoid the full impact of the zamindari system's abolition by retaining large tracts under "personal cultivation." Several other tactics were employed to thwart the introduction and implementation of zamindari abolition legislation.

 

•    Because such legislation had to be passed by state legislatures, the landlords used every means at their disposal to obstruct the process. The draught bills were subjected to lengthy debates, remands to select committees, and numerous amendments were proposed, resulting in several years passing between the introduction of the bills and the enactment of the laws in many states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

 

•    Even after the laws were passed, landlords used the legal system to postpone their implementation. They repeatedly challenged the constitutionality of the laws in the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, as we saw earlier.

 

•    Even after losing their case twice in the Supreme Court, the landlords in Bihar attempted to block the law's implementation. They are now refusing to hand over the land records they have, forcing the government to go through the time-consuming process of reconstructing the records. 

 

•    Furthermore, collusion between landlords and, particularly, lower-level revenue officials made the law's implementation difficult and, to the extent possible, skewed in favor of the zamindar. The fact that many of the revenue officials in zamindari areas had previously worked as zamindars' rent collectors aided the collusion. The landlords fought back at all levels of government, including the legislative, judicial, and executive branches.

 

•    The Congress responded by reiterating its commitment to completing the zamindari abrogation process as soon as possible. This resolve was reflected in AICC resolutions (e.g., July 1954), the Chief Ministers and Presidents of Provincial Congress Committees Conference (April 1950), the First Plan document, and, most importantly, the Congress election manifestos. 

 

•    On the one hand, democracy with adult franchise reduced the political clout of the zamindars, while on the other, it increased the urgency of meeting the peasantry's long-standing demands. Over the years, the Congress had successfully mobilized the peasantry to make these demands. The Congress also took administrative and legislative steps, such as getting the 1951 and 1955 constitutional amendments passed by parliament, in order to meet the landlords' challenge.

 

•    Despite the landlords' opposition, the process of zamindari abolition was essentially completed within a decade of the formation of the Indian Republic, except in a few pockets of Bihar. The traditional large ‘feudal' estates had vanished. 

 

•    While the big landlords lost the majority of their lands, the occupancy tenants or upper tenants, who had direct leases from the zamindar and were now landowners, were the main beneficiaries of zamindari abolition. Such tenants were usually middle or upper-class peasants who had subleases granted to lower-class tenants with limited rights, known as "tenants at will."

 

•    Even after zamindari was abolished, the issue of continuing tenancy in zamindari areas, both oral and unrecorded, persisted. Former zamindars' lands, now said to be under their 'personal cultivation,' as well as lands sub-leased by the former occupancy tenant who later became the landowner, all had such tenancy. Furthermore, only about half of the country was under zamindari control at the time of independence. The other half was ryotwari, where landlordism and an insecure, rack-rented tenantry were also prevalent.

 

•    As a result, the tenancy legislation was the second major plank of the proposed land reforms. The nature of tenancy legislation passed by different states, as well as the manner in which it was implemented, varied greatly due to the political and economic conditions in different parts of India. 

 

•    Nonetheless, the various legislations had some common goals, and over time, some broad similarities in the way they were implemented in most parts of the country emerged. It is a study of only these common features, not the numerous differences that are possible within the scope of this research.

 

1)    First, to provide security of tenure to tenants who had continuously cultivated a piece of land for a set period of time, say six years (the exact number of years varied from region to region). 

 

2)    Second, to seek a reduction in tenant rents to a "fair" level, which was generally thought to be between one-fourth and one-sixth of the value of the leased land's gross produce. 

 

3)    The third goal was for the tenant to be granted the right to purchase the lands he cultivated, subject to certain conditions. 

 

The tenant was expected to pay a significantly lower price than the market rate, typically a multiple of the annual rent, such as eight or ten years' rent. For example, in some parts of Andhra Pradesh, he had to pay eight years' rent, which was roughly 40% of the land's market price.

 

•    It is worth noting that, while attempting to improve the condition of tenants, Indian tenancy legislation has generally sought to strike a balance between the interests of the landowner, particularly small landowners, and the tenant. The absentee landowners' right of resumption of land for 'personal cultivation,' which was granted in most parts of India, as well as the tenants' right to acquire the lands they cultivated, were both managed by a complex and variable system of 'floors' and 'ceilings,' which kept this balance in mind. 

 

•    The right of resumption of a landowner was limited (again, this was aimed at large landowners) to a total holding after resumption that did not exceed a certain limit or ceiling set by each state. A limit of three times the ‘family holding' was proposed in the First Plan. A single plough unit was used to define a family holding. 

 

•    Furthermore, the landowner could not deprive the tenant of all of his lands while resuming land. The tenant had to be left with at least half of his holding in some states, including Kerala, Orissa, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu. In some other states, such as Bihar, the floor was half the tenant's holding or a minimum of five acres (two and a half acres in West Bengal), whichever was less. 

 

•    The tenants' right to acquire the landowner's lands, on the other hand (and this was aimed at the small landowner), was limited by the condition that the landowner not be deprived of all of his lands and that the tenants' holding after acquisition did not exceed the ceiling set by each state. 

 

•    ‘The economic circumstances of small owners are not so different from those of tenants that tenancy legislation should operate to their disadvantage,' as the Second Plan noted. As a result, the Plan envisaged very small landowners resuming self-cultivation of their entire holding. 

 

•    The actual experience of enforcing the tenancy laws, on the other hand, was more complicated. The provisions introduced to protect small landowners were misused by the larger landlords with the active connivance of the revenue officials, according to P.S. Appu, who headed the Planning Commission Task Force on Agrarian Relations (which reported in 1973). 4 Large landowners transfer their lands in the names of a number of relatives and others in order to fall into the category of "small landowner," and then evict tenants from such lands by exercising the right of resumption granted to small owners, according to the Third Plan. 

 

•    In fact, the right of resumption and the vague definition of ‘personal cultivation' mentioned earlier (personal labour by the landowner was initially a condition of resumption for personal cultivation in only Manipur and Tripura) were used to evict tenants on a large scale. 

 

•    The eviction process had already begun in preparation for the impending tenancy legislation. Vested interests engineered the excessive delays in enacting and implementing the legislations in order to evict potential beneficiaries before the law took effect.

 

•    The practise was so widespread that the Fourth Plan was forced to recommend that all surrenders be made to the government, which could then allot the lands to eligible people. However, only a few states followed through on this recommendation.

 

•    However, based solely on recorded tenancies, the 1971 Census came to absurd conclusions such as 91.1 percent of cultivated land in India was owned by individuals, Bihar had the highest percentage of area under owner cultivation of any state, 99.6%, and tenancies accounted for only 0.22 percent of operational holdings and 0.17 percent of total cultivated land! This is at a time when it is widely assumed that Bihar had a high proportion of tenancy, with the 1961 Census reporting a figure of 36.65%. 

 

•    The other issue was that Bengal's land-man ratio was such that the landlord could often divide leased land among two or more sharecroppers or bargadars, i.e., there could be more than one bargadar claiming tenancy rights for each piece of land. Anyone who registers will permanently oust the other. 

 

•    Furthermore, if all of the bargadars were registered in this situation, the size of the holdings per cultivator would risk falling far below the optimal level. As a result, there were political and economic constraints on how far Operation Barga could go; the objective situation did not allow for the full implementation of the concept of "land to the tiller" or even the provision of full tenure security to each cultivator.

 

•    As a result, the first goal of Indian tenancy legislation, providing security of tenure to all tenants, has had only limited success. While many tenants got security (many even became landowners, as we'll see later), there were still a lot of people who were unprotected. 

 

•    Despite partial success stories like Kerala and West Bengal, the practice of unsecured tenancy, mostly oral, continued on a large scale in India, whether in the form of share-cropping, the payment of fixed produce, or cash rent. The continued presence of a large number of insecure tenants has made the successful implementation of the second major goal of tenancy legislation that of lowering rents to a "fair" level, nearly impossible. 

 

•    High rents were pushed by market conditions, such as the adverse land-man ratio that developed in India during colonial rule. In such a situation, legal "fair" rents could only be enforced if the tenants were secure and had occupancy rights, which meant they couldn't be removed or changed.

 

•    Every state has passed legislation regulating the rent that cultivating tenants must pay. The majority of states set maximum rents at the levels suggested by the First and Second Plans, i.e. 20 to 25% of gross output. Some states, such as Punjab, Haryana, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh (coastal areas), have set maximum rents that range from 33.3 to 40%. In practise, however, market rent rates in almost every part of the country tended to hover around 50% of gross output. 

 

•    Furthermore, the tenant was frequently responsible for the entire or a significant portion of the cost of the production inputs. Furthermore, the Green Revolution, which began in some parts of India in the late 1960s, exacerbated the problems, with land values and rental rates rising even more, reaching as high as 70% in some parts of Punjab, for example. What made matters worse was that only the poorest, most insecure tenants or sharecroppers were required to pay market rent. Only the upper echelon of the tenantry, who had secured occupancy rights and were often indistinguishable from a landowner, could compel the payment of legal rent rates.

 

•    The third goal of Indian tenancy legislation, namely, the acquisition of ownership rights by tenants, was only partially achieved. The use of the right to resumption by landowners, legal and illegal evictions, ‘voluntary' surrenders, shift to oral and or concealed tenancy, and other factors, as we saw above, eroded the possibility of achieving this goal adequately. However, it should be noted that a significant number of tenants did obtain ownership rights.

 

•    Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive data on this topic for the entire country. Certain case studies from specific regions, on the other hand, may serve as an indicator. P.S. Appu wrote in 1975 that, according to "latest information," more than half of the 1.3 million tenants in Gujarat had acquired ownership rights, namely 0.77 million, and more than half of the 2.6 million tenants in Maharashtra had acquired ownership rights, namely 1.1 million. 

 

•    A significant number of tenants became owners in other states as well, numbering in the millions. (It should be noted that this is in addition to the 20 million or so tenants who became landowners after intermediaries were abolished in zamindari areas.) It has been suggested that one reason why a larger number of tenants did not acquire ownership rights was that for a large number of tenants who had obtained permanent occupancy rights and reduced rent, there was little incentive to try to acquire full ownership, which would require not only raising capital (albeit a fraction of the market value of land), but also legal and other complexities. For all intents and purposes, these superior tenants were virtual owners.

 

•    The combined effect of zamindari abolition, tenancy legislation, and land ceiling legislation in the direction of achieving one of the major goals of land reform, namely the creation of progressive cultivators who invest and improve productivity, was significant. 

 

•    Despite all the evasions, leakages, loopholes, and other flaws in India's land reforms, economist Daniel Thorner noted in 1968 that "many millions of cultivators who had previously been weak tenants or tenants-at-will were enabled to become superior tenants or virtual owners."

 

•    When certain changes are listed together, the total impact can be easily calculated. The abolition of zamindari resulted in approximately 20 million superior occupancy tenants becoming landowners, and many absentee zamindars actually returning to direct cultivation on the lands that had been ‘resumed' for ‘personal' cultivation. 

 

•    Nearly half of the tenants in ryotwari areas, such as Bombay and Gujarat, become landowners. Furthermore, about half of the lands from which tenants were evicted (roughly 70% in Bombay) were used by landowners for direct cultivation, i.e., they were not hiddenly leased out again. In addition, there are a large number of substandard tenants in the area.

 

•    Occupation rights were granted to former ryotwari areas (about half in Gujarat and Maharashtra). Nearly half of the sharecroppers in former zamindari areas like West Bengal received occupancy rights. Add in the three to five million landless cultivators who received land that was declared surplus due to ceiling laws.

 

•    Now, tenants and sharecroppers who were given occupancy rights and paid lower fixed rents, tenants who were given ownership rights, the landless who were given land that was declared surplus over ceiling limits, and absentee landowners who became direct cultivators all had the motivation, and many had the potential, to become progressive farmers using their own resources or credit from institutions.