Land Reforms in India: Tenures, Ceilings and Tenancy

Land reform means changing the law of who owns farmland, who tills it and on what terms. India began independence with a countryside in which most cultivators were tenants or sharecroppers of landlords who did not farm, and the first two decades of planning treated the repair of that arrangement as the foundation of agricultural growth and of rural equality. Land is a State subject under the State List of the Seventh Schedule, which is why every reform below is a patchwork of state laws rather than one national statute, and why its success differs so sharply between Kerala, West Bengal and Punjab on one side and much of the Hindi belt on the other.

The three colonial land tenures

The systems the British left behind decide the shape of the problem. The Permanent Settlement of 1793, introduced by Lord Cornwallis in Bengal, Bihar and Odisha, recognised zamindars as owners of the land in return for a revenue demand fixed for ever, and left the cultivator with no right against them. The Ryotwari system, developed by Thomas Munro and Alexander Read in the Madras and Bombay presidencies, settled revenue directly with the individual cultivator or ryot, with periodic revision. The Mahalwari system, framed by Holt Mackenzie in 1822 and revised under Lord William Bentinck in 1833, made the village or mahal jointly responsible for revenue in the North-Western Provinces, Punjab and parts of central India. Zamindari covered the largest share of British India, and it is the system against which the first wave of reform was directed.

The four components of land reform

The first component is the abolition of intermediaries. Between 1948 and the middle of the nineteen fifties almost every state passed a law ending zamindari and jagirdari, among them the Madras Estates Act of 1948 and the Bihar and Uttar Pradesh land reform laws of 1950, and about twenty million tenants came into direct contact with the state. When the courts began striking these laws down as a breach of the right to property, Parliament enacted the First Amendment in 1951, which added Articles 31A and 31B and the Ninth Schedule to shield them from challenge. This component is counted the clear success of Indian land reform.

The second component is tenancy reform, with three aims: the regulation of rent at a fixed share of produce instead of the half or more that landlords took, security of tenure so that a tenant could not be evicted at will, and, where possible, the conferment of ownership on the tenant. Kerala abolished tenancy outright and gave ownership to the cultivating tenant, and West Bengal, from 1978, registered its sharecroppers under the programme called Operation Barga, which gave the bargadar a permanent and heritable right to till. Elsewhere large numbers of tenancies were oral and unrecorded, so landlords evicted tenants before the law could record them, a loss the Hindi belt never recovered from.

The third component is the ceiling on holdings, a limit on how much land one family may own, with the surplus taken by the state and given to the landless. State ceilings came in the nineteen sixties and were made more uniform by national guidelines in 1972, which set the limit for a family by the quality of land, from about ten to eighteen acres of land with assured irrigation and two crops to about fifty-four acres of dry land. Implementation was weak: exemptions for plantations and religious trusts, transfers in the names of relatives and servants, called benami transfers, and endless litigation kept most surplus land out of the state's hands.

The fourth component is the consolidation of holdings, in which the scattered plots of a farmer are exchanged to give one compact field. This answered the fragmentation produced by inheritance, and it worked well in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, where consolidation was made compulsory, while southern and eastern states made little use of it.

Bhoodan, Gramdan and the committees

Alongside legislation ran a voluntary movement. Vinoba Bhave began the Bhoodan or land gift movement at Pochampally in 1951, walking from village to village and asking landowners to give a share of their land for the landless; Gramdan, the gift of a whole village to the community, grew out of it. The movement collected a large area but much of it was poor land, and distribution was slow. On the official side the Congress Agrarian Reforms Committee under J.C. Kumarappa reported in 1949 and recommended the abolition of intermediaries and a ceiling on holdings, and the Planning Commission's task force on agrarian relations in 1973 recorded how little of the ceiling law had worked. The right to property itself was removed from the list of fundamental rights by the Forty-fourth Amendment of 1978 and now stands as a legal right under Article 300A, which made later land legislation easier to defend.

Land tenure systems at a glance

Where reform stands

• Abolition of intermediaries succeeded; tenancy reform succeeded in Kerala and West Bengal; ceilings and consolidation largely failed outside the north-west.
• Oral tenancy, benami transfers and weak land records are the three standard reasons given for failure.
• Modern policy has shifted from redistribution to records: the central programme for the modernisation of land records and the Svamitva scheme of 2020 map and title rural property.
• NITI Aayog circulated a model law on agricultural land leasing in 2016 to make tenancy legal and recorded rather than hidden.