Land reforms have failed in the eradication of rural poverty. Comment. (2016, 20 Marks)
Colonial revenue settlements turned land into a commodity and placed the surplus with rentiers who did not cultivate. Daniel Thorner (The Agrarian Prospect in India, 1956) called this the “built-in depressor”: the landlord had no reason to invest and the insecure tenant no means to. Land reform after 1947 was meant to release both justice and growth under the slogan “land to the tiller”. The statement is largely true, but it needs two qualifications.
What was attempted, and what it achieved
- Abolition of intermediaries (from the UP and Bihar Acts of 1950) was the one national success. About two crore tenants came into direct relation with the state, but resumption for “personal cultivation” let zamindars survive as large owner-cultivators.
- Tenancy reform capped rents and promised security. It mostly drove leasing underground into oral, rotated arrangements. Wolf Ladejinsky, reporting to the Planning Commission in 1965, found tenants in the package districts as insecure as before.
- Ceilings were the weakest link. The Rural Development Ministry’s 2009 committee on agrarian relations counted about 65.6 lakh acres declared surplus by 2007, but only 49.7 lakh acres distributed to some 55 lakh beneficiaries. That is roughly 1.4% of net sown area.
- The legal route (the First, Fourth and Seventeenth Amendments and the Ninth Schedule) protected the statutes in court. It could not enforce them in the village.
Why the reforms fell short
- Class character of the ruling party: the Congress at district level was the landed peasantry. Francine Frankel calls this accommodative politics: radical goals were announced, then traded away when it came to implementation.
- Evasion: benami transfers, notional family partitions, generous exemptions and decades of stay orders.
- Records and bureaucracy: revenue records named the taxpayer, not the tiller, and they were kept by a village functionary open to local pressure.
- Beneficiaries left without support: allottees received poor, unirrigated land with no credit, inputs or market links, and much of it was resold or re-occupied.
- Arithmetic: inheritance, not redistribution, split holdings down to an average of 1.08 ha (Agriculture Census 2015-16). Even perfect ceilings could not have given every landless family a viable farm.
Where reform worked
- Kerala (Land Reforms (Amendment) Act, 1969) ended landlordism and gave hutment dwellers their house sites. Combined with public education and health, it helped give Kerala the lowest multidimensional poverty in India.
- Operation Barga (West Bengal, from 1978) registered about 1.5 million sharecroppers. Abhijit Banerjee, Paul Gertler and Maitreesh Ghatak (2002) attribute about 28% of the state’s later growth in farm productivity to it.
- Across states, Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess (2000) found that tenancy and intermediary reforms reduced rural poverty.
- Atul Kohli shows the difference was political: it came from a disciplined party with a base among the poor, not from better laws.
Qualifying “failed”
- No single instrument eradicates poverty. Rural poverty did fall, but mainly through Green Revolution output, public distribution, rural wages and non-farm work. About 24.82 crore Indians left multidimensional poverty between 2013-14 and 2022-23 (NITI Aayog).
- The agenda has moved, not died. The unrecorded tenant is now the main target. The Model Agricultural Land Leasing Act, 2016 would legalise and record leases. DILRMP has digitised about 98% of rural records, and SVAMITVA drone surveys have produced roughly 3.1 crore property cards for village homesteads.
Conclusion
Land reform failed at redistribution wherever it had to confront the dominant cultivating castes. It succeeded where a mobilised party made implementation pay at the polls. It removed a parasitic tier but not rural poverty. Today, completing the record of rights and legalising tenancy would do more for the rural poor than any new ceiling law.