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 zamindarsresort 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 farmerswho 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 1961suffered 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 lateas 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.