Agrarian Reform in India

April 21, 2010• Indian Agriculture• by EconomyWatch

Agrarian reform is the redistribution of land and other agricultural assets, generally with the aim of
providing "land to the tiller." The basic idea is that those who work the land should also own it, to
ensure that they benefit from the fruits of their own labor. Existing large land owners of course
resist such redistribution of assets. Struggles for land or agrarian reform have occurred in
numerous countries around the world, with varying degree of success.

Land reforms that have actually been implemented vary in the rules
• by which land to be redistributed is identified (for example, a land ceilings may be determined
for the maximum amounts of irrigated and unirrigated land a single owner may own, with the
excess being redistributed),
• of compensation for the land taken away from the present owners (paid in market rates, by a
government-determined rate, or not at all),
• who is to benefit from the redistribution (e.g., existing tenants or landless workers),
• and the kinds of new land tenure that are established (e.g., individual small farms, collective
farms, or state farms).

Agrarian reform can extend far beyond the redistribution of land, including overhauling the system
of agriculture in a country or simply changing practices to make the land more sustainable.
Tha main focus of this article will, however, be the redistribution of land, since this is the most
critical asset required for agricultural production.

• Food agricultural reform allows small farmers/former peasants to obtain land to produce food
for their own subsistence needs as well as for sale. Large estates have little reason to produce
food for poor people, so land reform can often lead to a shift of land use, reducing export
production for affluent countries and increasing food crop production for local consumption.
• Security – having redistributed land gives the security of land ownership to peasants and
farmers and gives them a more stable future.
• Meaningful livelihood – agricultural reform allows for the previously unobtainable livelihoods that
many peasants sought to feed their families.
• Participation – land reform gives the peasants a voice in their treatment of the land that they
now own. Conversely, land reform requires participation of the beneficiaries in political
decision-making (concerning how the land reform is structured and implemented) to ensure that
they actually obtain the promised benefits.

Types of Land Reform

Title Reforms

Title reforms create legal titles in land according to Western law in order to replace traditional
arrangements, and thus alter rules of land use, transfer, inheritance, sale, and so on, i.e., the
rules of property in land. They can be the prelude to allowing wealthy people to acquire most of
the land and thus to the creation of a new rural class system, as occurred in numerous European
colonial regimes. Existing inequities in landholding are often solidified in the process. However,
some of the rural smallholders may also enjoy some advantages compared to previous regimes,
for example if tenants gain a better standing relative to landlords.

Redistribution Reforms

This type of reform is the most common and is often the one most associated with agrarian
reform. It involves the transfer of land from one social class to another, typically from landlords
who do little or no work on the farm, to tenants or farm laborers who do the farm work but have
not hitherto gotten a fair share of the rewards of their own labor ("land to the tiller"). Mechanisms
for the transfer vary. In some cases, colonial elites left the country, allowing redistribution to
proceed with little resistance (e.g., in Korea after the Japanese occupation). In most cases,
however, the old landlord class remained largely in place, and were either removed forcibly (the
rule in most Communist regimes in China, the Soviet Union, and Central and Eastern Europe), or
made to give up land above a government-determined land ceiling (e.g., India, Egypt). In the
latter situation, land owners were either offered compensation (either at market prices of the land,
or at a price determined by the government), or the land was taken without compensation (on the
theory that the present landownership was not legitimate).

Beneficiaries of land reform could consist of small independent farmers getting a larger piece of
land, tenants on the existing estates, or agricultural laborers (or any combination of the above).
The land could be vested in individuals (e.g., in India), in rural communities (e.g., the ejidos in
Mexico), in rural cooperatives or communes, or in state-owned enterprises (both of the latter
types were common in Communist land reforms). This process of redistribution had vast
implications for who actually benefited from reforms.

Cultivation Reform

This reform promotes changes in land use practices, such as particular crop rotations or specific
kinds of fertilizer, with aims such as increasing crop yields, by means of rules or regulations
governing land use. Depending on who issues the rules with which aims in mind, and on the
degree of participation of the farming population (and especially of marginalized members of the
rural community), the outcomes of such reform may or may not be consistent with greater
abundance for the local population.

Education and Economic Reform

The education and economic portion of agrarian reform aims at educating farmers and other
stakeholders (e.g., suppliers of agricultural inputs) about cultivation practices, new technologies,
and the like. Critical questions about such reforms include whose knowledge and observations
are valorized (or, conversely, ignored), and whether the methods and technologies that are being
promoted contribute to sustainable, equitable agriculture.
Agrarian Reform in India had been adopted to reallocate the agricultural resources among ```all
the people directly connected with agriculture. After independence, the Government of India
started the process of building equity in rural population and improvement of the employment rate
and productivity. So for this reason the Government had started agrarian reform.

Reasons Behind Agrarian reform:

Since India had been under several rulers for a long time, i.e right from the beginning of the
middle age, that's why it's rural economic policies kept changing. The main focus of those policies
was to earn more money by exploiting the poor farmers.
In the British period the scenario had not changed much. The British Government introduced the
"Zamindari" system where the the authority of land had been captured by some big and rich
landowners called Zamindar. Moreover they created an intermediate class to collect tax easily.
This class had no direct relationship with agriculture or land. Those Zamindars could acquire land
from the British Government almost free of cost. So the economic security of the poor peasants
lost completely. After independence, the Government's main focus was to remove those
intermediate classes and secure a proper land management system. Since India is a large
country, the redistribution process was a big challenge for the Government.

Objectives:
According to agrarian reform land was declared as a property of State Government. So agrarian
reform varied from state to state. But the main objectives of agrarian reform in India were:
Setting proper land management,
Abolition of Intermediaries
Preventing fragmentation of lands,
Tenancy reform.

done upto for self finanicing 8th

The land policies of different states faced several controversies . In some state the reform
measures were biased in favour of big land owners who could wield their political influence.
However, agrarian reform in India had set a healthy socio-economic structure in the rural areas.
India

Each region of India had its own land tenure regime during Mughal and earlier times, as
determined by the particularities of land, climate, and culture as well as of local caste and class
systems. The British tried to make these systems more uniform, more legible (in the sense of
James Scott, 1998), more productive of certain crops and of land revenues by means of various
title reforms. They generally strengthened the property claims of wealthy landowners (e.g., the
zamindars) in order to establish a class of rural landowners who would be supportive of British
rule; even where reforms were supposed to promote the interests of smallholders (the ryots), they
more often promoted the interests of the middling tenants rather than those of the poor. Since the
British never were able to totally homogenize land systems across the subcontinent, India had a
patchwork of different land systems at the time of independence (1947). Severe inequities in
landholding were virtually ubiquitous, however, and in 1958 a national survey concluded that a
quarter of people did not own land at all and another quarter owned less than an acre, meaning
that nearly 50% of the population did not have access to their own land.

As part of swaraj (self-rule, independence), the Indian National Congress (INC) as well as the
Communist Party of India (CPI) called for land reforms. However, in many areas the INC, the
dominant party across most of India, depended on political support of the landowning classes,
which severely hampered reform efforts, leading to very variable efforts from state to state.
Where the CPI (and later another party, the CPI-Marxist or CPM that split off from the CPI) were
able to mobilize mass movements for reform, more serious reform efforts were implemented –
meaning in the states of West Bengal in the East and Kerala in the South.

The Kerala land reforms in particular are credited with providing land to most tenant farmers,
meaning that the predominant land ownership there now consists of small owner-operated farms.
Meanwhile, unionized agricultural laborers got very little land, mainly the land on which their huts
stood, and which many of them use as home gardens providing significant amounts of fruits and
vegetables. The agricultural laborers however did organize effectively in order to gain daily wages
that are significantly higher than those in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu. Additional reforms
ensured that most rural people have access to health care and elementary education. The
literacy rate among both women and men exceeds 90% since the early 1990s. These as well as
later reforms have ensured that food security is very high compared to other Indian states. Also,
fertility rates declined to replacement levels as a result of better education and better security of
land ownership (farmers who own a small amount of land but will have to divide it up among their
sons typically desire small family sizes). These reforms were enacted bit by bit, as the Kerala
Congress Party and the Communist parties vied for control of the state legislature, and could only
win elections by promising (and implementing) reforms that were recognized as better than those
of their political opponents. For more on the Kerala land reforms, see Franke and Chasin, 1989;
on Indian land reforms in general, see Prosterman et al. (1990 and 2009).

A more mainstream example of land reform occurred in the state of Karnataka through their land
reform act of 1961, which outlined nearly everything a landowner must do to establish certain
property rights;
 Cultivation Reform

This reform promotes changes in land use practices, such as particular crop rotations or specific
kinds of fertilizer, with aims such as increasing crop yields, by means of rules or regulations
governing land use. Depending on who issues the rules with which aims in mind, and on the
degree of participation of the farming population (and especially of marginalized members of the
rural community), the outcomes of such reform may or may not be consistent with greater
abundance for the local population.

Education and Economic Reform

The education and economic portion of agrarian reform aims at educating farmers and other
stakeholders (e.g., suppliers of agricultural inputs) about cultivation practices, new technologies,
and the like. Critical questions about such reforms include whose knowledge and observations
are valorized (or, conversely, ignored), and whether the methods and technologies that are being
promoted contribute to sustainable, equitable agriculture.