Indian Economy Quiz: Land Reforms in India

In 1793 he settled the land revenue of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha permanently with the zamindars, who were recognised as proprietors so long as they paid a demand fixed for ever, and the cultivator was left without any recorded right in the land.

Working with Alexander Read in the ceded districts and later as Governor of Madras, Munro settled the revenue directly with each cultivator, the ryot, who was recognised as the owner of his field so long as he paid, with the demand revised every twenty or thirty years.

Courts had begun to strike down zamindari abolition laws as a breach of the right to property, so Parliament inserted Articles 31A and 31B and created the Ninth Schedule, in which a law can be placed to put it beyond challenge on the ground that it takes away a fundamental…

From 1978 the state government ran a campaign to enter the names of sharecroppers, known there as bargadars, in official records, which gave them a permanent and heritable right to cultivate and a legally fixed share of the crop, and it is quoted as the most effective tenancy reform in…

Walking through the villages of the Telangana region in 1951 he asked landowners to treat the landless as their own kin and to gift a share of their land, and the first such gift at Pochampally began the Bhoodan or land gift movement, later extended as Gramdan, the gift of…

Land, rights in and over land, land tenures, the relation of landlord and tenant, and the collection of rent are entries of List II of the Seventh Schedule, which is why zamindari abolition, tenancy law and ceilings were enacted state by state and why their record varies so much.

These states made consolidation compulsory and completed it over most of their cultivated area, exchanging a farmer's scattered strips for one compact block, which made tube wells, tractors and field channels worth installing and so fed into the green revolution.

A benami transfer records land in the name of a relative, a servant or a fictitious person while the real owner keeps control, and it was the commonest device used to stay within the family ceiling on paper while holding far more land in fact, which is one reason so…

Passed in 1978, it deleted the right to property from Part III and re-enacted it as Article 300A, under which no person may be deprived of property except by authority of law, so the protection is now a legal right enforceable through the ordinary courts rather than a fundamental right.

The laws passed between 1948 and the middle of the nineteen fifties ended zamindari, jagirdari and similar tenures across the country and brought about twenty million cultivators into direct relation with the state, and the First Amendment of 1951 secured those laws, so the class of rent collecting intermediaries disappeared.