5.2. Measures undertaken for Land Reforms

Land reform legislation in India consisted of four main categories:

a) Tenancy regulation that attempts to improve the contractual terms faced by tenants, including crop shares and security of tenure.

b) Abolition of intermediaries who were rent collectors under the pre-Independence land revenue system.

c) A ceiling on landholdings with a view to redistributing surplus land to the landless.

d) Attempts to consolidate disparate landholdings.

The first category of land reform, namely tenancy reform, imposed regulation that attempted to improve the contractual terms faced by tenants, including crop shares and security of tenure. Under the British land-revenue system, large feudal landowners (zamindars) received the rights to collect tributes from peasants in exchange for a land tax paid to the state. Almost half of the land was under this system at the time of Independence. This system was considered exploitative, and abolition of intermediaries was aimed at curtailing the power of these large landowners and ensuring that the cultivator of the land was in direct contact with the government, which minimized unjust extraction of surplus by the landowner.

The third form of land reform was the imposition of a ceiling on landholdings that aimed to redistribute surplus land to the landless. Finally, consolidation of landholdings constituted the fourth kind of land reform, which ensured that small bits of land belonging to the same small landowner but situated at some distance from one another could be consolidated into a single holding to boost viability and productivity. Because of variation in land quality across plots, this measure has been difficult to implement.

Abolition of intermediaries is generally agreed to be one component of land reforms that has been relatively successful. The record in terms of the other components is mixed and varies across states and over time. For example, under the ceiling law only 1.7 per cent of total cultivated area has been declared surplus and only 1 per cent of it has been distributed. Landowners naturally resisted the implementation of these reforms by directly using their political clout and also by using various methods of evasion and coercion, which included registering their own land under names of different relatives to bypass the ceiling, and shuffling

tenants around different plots of land, so that they would not acquire incumbency rights as stipulated in the tenancy law, and possibly even outright eviction.

The general assessment on land reforms in the Indian context is rather negative. For example, the report of the Task Force on Agrarian Relations of the Planning Commission of India (1973) had the following overall assessment of land reforms in India: ‘The programmes of land reform adopted since Independence have failed to bring about the required changes in the agrarian structure.’ The report directly blames the political will of the state governments for this failure:

The lack of political will is amply demonstrated by the large gaps between policy and legislation and between law and its implementation. In no sphere of public activity in our country since Independence has the hiatus between precept and practice, between policy pronouncements and actual execution been as great as in the domain of land reforms.

Land policy in India has undergone broadly four phases since Independence.

1. The first and longest phase (1950 - 72) consisted of land reforms that included three major efforts: abolition of the intermediaries, tenancy reform, and the redistribution of land using land ceilings. The abolition of intermediaries was relatively successful, but tenancy reform and land ceilings met with less success.

2. The second phase (1972 - 85) shifted attention to bringing uncultivated land under cultivation.

3. The third phase (1985 - 95) increased attention towards water and soil conservation through the Watershed Development, Drought-Prone Area Development (DPAP) and Desert-Area Development Programmes (DADP). A central government Waste land Development Agency was established to focus on wasteland and degraded land. Some of the land policy from this phase continued beyond its final year.

4. The fourth and current phase of policy (1995 onwards) centres on debates about the necessity to continue with land legislation and efforts to improve land revenue administration and, in particular, clarity in land records.

Land policy has also been one of the important components incorporated in all the plans. The policy statements are sometimes quite explicit in the plan documents, but are more often implicitly stated. An overview of changes in the land policy as reflected through the various plan documents is as follows: