Examine the changing initiatives of the land tenure system in India. (2019)
Land tenure is the bundle of rights that determines who may hold, cultivate, transfer and draw rent from land. India’s tenure history is a sequence of initiatives, each correcting the last and breeding new distortions. Tested against what matters — whether the tiller holds secure, recorded rights — it shows real legal movement and stubborn social continuity.
From revenue right to property right: the colonial settlements
Pre-colonial arrangements recognised a share in the produce, not exclusive ownership: cultivators, village bodies and revenue farmers held overlapping claims. The British converted revenue liability into transferable private property, in three different ways.
| Settlement | Where | Who was made proprietor | Social consequence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Permanent Settlement (Lord Cornwallis, 1793) | Bengal, Bihar, Odisha | The zamindar, on a revenue fixed in perpetuity | A rentier class; subinfeudation; cultivators reduced to tenants with no occupancy right until 1859 |
| Ryotwari (Thomas Munro, from the 1820s) | Madras and Bombay Presidencies | The ryot, paying the State directly | Peasant proprietors on paper; cash demand bred indebtedness and land transfer to moneylenders — the Deccan riots of 1875 |
| Mahalwari (Regulation VII of 1822) | North-Western Provinces, Punjab | The mahal through its lambardar, jointly liable | Preserved dominant peasant brotherhoods, ruined weaker co-sharers; a source of 1857 |
Daniel Thorner read the resulting structure of rent, debt and status as a “built-in depressor” on agricultural productivity.
Abolition: converting tenants into owners
After 1947 the first initiative stripped out the rentier layer. Intermediary tenures were extinguished across the States by the mid-1950s, bringing roughly 20 million tenants into direct relation with the State — the one unambiguous success. But zamindars retained all land shown as under “personal cultivation”, a term left deliberately loose, and evicted lower tenants to enlarge it.
Regulation that informalised tenure
Tenancy laws regulated rent, promised security of tenure and offered a right of purchase. Their perverse effect was to push tenancy underground: the Planning Commission’s 1956 panel recorded protected tenants in Bombay falling from 1.7 million to 1.3 million in three years, and the 1961 Census found 82% of tenancies insecure. Where peasants were mobilised the outcome differed: Kerala’s 1969 amendment abolished landlordism and gave kudikidappukars homestead title, and West Bengal’s Operation Barga (1978 onwards) recorded about 1.5 million bargadars with heritable rights.
The present turn: recording rather than prohibiting
- Prohibition, not tenancy, is now seen as the problem. Agricultural Census returns show under 1% of operated area leased-in against the NSSO’s 11.1% (2012–13), and concealed tenants cannot reach institutional credit, crop insurance or disaster compensation.
- The NITI Aayog Model Agricultural Land Leasing Act (2016) and Andhra Pradesh’s Crop Cultivator Rights Act (2019) legalise and record leasing while protecting the owner’s title, though a 2023 Economic and Political Weekly assessment argues the Andhra law swings too far towards the landowner.
- Records are being rebuilt: SVAMITVA has distributed over 2.6 crore rural property cards, and the Forest Rights Act (2006) has created a new tenure category, with some 24 lakh individual and 1.2 lakh community titles.
Conclusion
Tenure has changed decisively in law and only partly in life. The rentier has gone, yet a 2026 World Inequality Lab study finds land concentration still higher in former zamindari tracts. The live question is no longer who owns the estate but whether the tiller’s name appears in the record: recording, not fresh legislation, is this generation’s tenure reform.