‘The transfer of land from cultivating to the non-cultivating owners is bringing about transformation in Indian society.’ Justify your answer by giving suitable illustrations. (2025)
Daniel Thorner, in The Agrarian Prospect in India (1956), sorted agrarian India by the source of income: maliks who live off property rights, kisans who till their own land, mazdoors who sell labour. The statement describes the malik category expanding again. The claim is justified, and what it transforms is social structure, not merely the pattern of ownership.
How ownership is separating from cultivation
- Cultivating households whose children have moved into salaried, urban or Gulf employment keep the ancestral land and lease it out rather than sell it.
- Urban professionals, traders and non-resident Indians buy farmland along highways and on the peri-urban fringe.
- Contract farming and corporate sourcing insert a firm between the owner and the field.
- Reverse tenancy: large owners lease in from small ones. In Punjab, leased-in area rose from roughly 15 to 25 per cent of operated area between 2002–03 and 2012–13, and about 95 per cent of leases were fixed cash rents — a capitalist tenancy, not a customary one.
The transformations it produces
- A rentier layer and an invisible tiller. The NSSO’s 70th round (2012–13) put leased-in area at 11.1 per cent of operated area; the Agriculture Census 2010–11 recorded under 1 per cent. Tenancy has gone oral. Since entitlement follows the record of rights, the actual cultivator loses institutional credit, crop insurance and disaster compensation, and PM-KISAN remains confined to land-holding farmers. The NITI Aayog Model Agricultural Land Leasing Act, 2016 and Andhra Pradesh’s Crop Cultivator Rights Act, 2019 answer precisely this exclusion.
- Land as status and speculation. Held for appreciation and prestige, it is not sold even when unviable, while acquisition and conversion conflicts multiply on the urban edge.
- Casualisation and feminisation. Tilling passes to Dalit, Adivasi and migrant labour and to women, who are now over 40 per cent of the agricultural workforce (PLFS 2023–24) but hold only 13.96 per cent of operational holdings (Agriculture Census 2015–16). SECC 2011 found 56.4 per cent of rural households owning no agricultural land.
- Power detached from residence. The absentee owner still commands village factions and panchayat contests, so dominant caste control survives its own out-migration.
The qualification
The trend is regionally uneven, and reverse tenancy has genuinely raised the operational scale of efficient farmers in the north-west. But NSS-based work on Punjab finds no conclusive evidence of large-scale reverse tenancy: the main lessees are already cultivators of two hectares and more.
Conclusion
The transformation is best named de-peasantisation — owners who do not cultivate and cultivators who do not own. Legal title and actual tilling have come apart, and every entitlement in Indian agriculture still travels with title.