When land reform was a paradigm shift, then what type of land reforms would you recommend to make India a more equitable society? (2026)
The first generation of land reform was a paradigm shift because it redefined property in land as a social trust rather than an absolute right: the State entered the agrarian structure, dissolved the rentier layer, and used the First Amendment (1951) and the Ninth Schedule to shield the project from the courts. Truncated, it leaves a second generation to target not large estates but insecure, unrecorded and gendered rights in land.
Why the first paradigm stalled
Abolition of intermediaries worked: roughly 20 million tenants came into direct relation with the State. Redistribution did not: of the land declared surplus under ceiling laws, only about 53 lakh acres, under 2% of cultivated area, reached the landless. Ronald J. Herring, in Land to the Tiller (1983), located the cause in politics, not drafting: reform succeeds only where the legislating class does not own the land.
What I would recommend
- Record tenancy instead of criminalising it. Agricultural Census returns show under 1% of operated area as leased-in, against the NSSO’s 11.1% estimate (2012–13). Prohibition did not end tenancy, only hid the tenant from credit, insurance and disaster relief. The NITI Aayog Model Agricultural Land Leasing Act (2016) and Andhra Pradesh’s Crop Cultivator Rights Act (2019) are the template, though a 2023 Economic and Political Weekly assessment warns that recording needs a statutory floor on the tenant’s share, or liberalisation merely restores the landlord.
- Homestead entitlement for the landless, on the Kerala kudikidappu pattern: a house site is trivial in acreage and large in consequence, becoming an address, collateral and standing.
- Joint and individual titles for women. The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 gave daughters coparcenary rights, yet the 2015–16 Agriculture Census found only 13.96% of holdings and 11.72% of operated area with female holders. Inheritance without operational control is a paper right.
- Enforce existing ceilings and tax large holdings progressively, rather than pass ceiling laws no assembly will approve.
- Secure tribal tenure under the Fifth Schedule, PESA (1996) and the Forest Rights Act (2006), where some 24 lakh individual and 1.2 lakh community titles stand against over 18 lakh rejections; community forest rights are the largest unfinished redistribution.
- Move towards conclusive title: carry SVAMITVA’s 2.6 crore-plus property cards beyond presumptive title, and let recorded leasing and producer collectives give scale without loss of ownership.
Conclusion
Equity in land means assets and voice, not income alone: PM-KISAN pays the recorded owner, so an unrecorded cultivator is excluded twice. André Béteille’s Sripuram study warns that abolishing a legal category does not abolish the social relation beneath it. The second generation must redistribute recognition as much as acreage.