Land Reform in India Necessary but not Sufficient to Fight Poverty
Patralekha Chatterjee
"These rich people will even take our little land away from us! Bhagwan, who is of my caste, has had half of his land eaten up by the Brahmin lawyer from Lalganj. The Brahmin has got the lekhpal (village land-record keeper) to draw a boundary across part of Bhagwan's land. Bhagwan has been working his land for the past 20 years since he got it on patta (from land reform). It was very poor land, sloping, but Bhagwan cut it and worked on until it was good. Then the Brahmin paid off the lekhpal and got the land!"1
Writer Siddharth Dube who framed his much-acclaimed book (1998) around the true experiences and life stories of over three generations of the Dalit (low-caste) family of Ram Dass Pasi in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) in India observes that in Baba ka Gaon, throughout UP, and across India, the battle over land continues. "The winners in the conflict today -- as in the past half-century and earlier -- are almost always those with large land-holdings, not the poor."
True, land reform has divested princes and large landowners who owned huge estates of 10,000 to 20,000 acres out of their hereditary property. But the ones who have gained are the medium prosperous farmers just below them, not the tillers of the soil. In UP, as in many other parts of the country, former feudal lords still own hundreds of acres of land either by exploiting legal loopholes or through illegal strategems.
Official data would have you believe that most of the large land-holdings have disappeared in the past half-century, that there is greater equity and there is no room left for any meaningful redistribution of land. But the reality is just the opposite, the tell-tale signs of which are all too visible. The number of utterly poor people in India at present is about the same as the entire population of the country in 1947 when India became independent from Britain. The absolute landless and the near landless (those with less than half an acre of land) make up 43 per cent of rural households in India.
Every ill that plagues India cannot be attributed to the failure of land reforms, but poverty and much of the violence and extremism in the country are even today highly correlated with lack of access to land. Ten years of economic liberalization have not made any significant dent on the lives of the absolute poor, who remain outside the ambit of the 'market', lack education, awareness and are overwhelmingly from the bottom of India's caste hierarchy. An extreme case in point is the state of Bihar. Rich in natural resources, this state in eastern India is one of the poorest and grabs headlines every time there is a "caste carnage". The lack of development in Bihar is due to the almost total failure to implement land reforms and the lack of any real mass movement against the existing land holding system.
This is not the sort of issue which resonates with India's burgeoning middle class, nor the influential English media which cater to city dwellers. But you do not have to be a scholar or look very far to see how this is likely to affect the future of urban India. The teeming slums of New Delhi and Mumbai abound with countless landless labourers who have flocked to the city in search of livelihood. Many among the migrants are from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar -- states which have an abysmal record in land reform.
Pre-independent India had a feudal agrarian structure. A small group of large landowners, including absentee landlords had land rights. The vast majority of cultivators did not have any right or had limited rights as tenants or sub-tenants. The poor mostly leased-in land for subsistence. If the tenants used improved seeds, manure or extra labour, they had to share half of the increased produce with the landlords. When India became independent, policy makers felt the system of cultivation by tenants had to be overhauled as it was highly exploitative.
The result was tenancy reforms which aimed to either abolish tenancy or regulate tenancy to ensure fixed tenure, fair rent etc. The whole point of tenancy reforms was to enable the poor tenants to cultivate their land more efficiently and improve their incomes. However the impact of tenancy reforms varied from state to state and from region to region. During the past two decades or so, the state of Karnataka in southern India tried to confer occupancy rights to tenants. Many state governments have banned agricultural tenancy but concealed tenancy exists. Many of the affluent states like Punjab and Haryana show a growing tendency towards 'reverse tenancy' in which large farmers lease land from small and marginal ones.
The big land reform success story is Operation Barga in Marxist-ruled West Bengal. The operation which was launched in 1978 led to the emergence of 1,500,000 share croppers. West Bengal's tenancy law provides the recorded share croppers permanent and heritable rights.
Under the Indian Constitution, land reform is the responsibility of individual states so while the federal government provides broad policy guidelines, the nature of land reform legislation, the level of political will and institutional support for land reform and the degree of success in implementing land reform have varied considerably from state to state with the agenda remaining unfinished in most states. Indian officialdom acknowledges its failure to implement land reforms. "If China has continued to be stable in spite of its size, defying the biological dictum that corpulence is a sign of decay, China watchers ascribe this to their land reforms. In India everyone was talking about land reforms but this vital area has taken a back seat with nothing being done," says Dr. K. Venkatasubramanian, member of India's Planning Commission.
His analysis (carried in the Commission's website) succinctly lists some of the key factors behind the tardy implementation of tenancy reforms in this country:
* tenancy reforms have excluded the share croppers who form the bulk of the tenant cultivators; * ejection of tenants still takes place on several grounds; * the right of resumption given in the legislation has led to land-grabbing by the unscrupulous; * fair rents are not uniform and not implemented in various states because of the acute land hunger existing in the country; * ownership rights could not be conferred on a large body of tenants because of the high rates of compensation to be paid to the tenants.
Today, land reform in rural India is at the cross-roads. Despite the inequity, the constituency advocating land reform is weakening day by day and the number of people pushing for a revocation of land ceilings is increasing. In the '90s, as India embraced economic liberalization, a growing consensus emerged among the vocal opinion-making class that ceilings on land have proved to be inefficient economic tools and hampered the development of agrobusiness. Increasingly, there is a demand for re-examination of the land reform issue. It is also being argued that liberalization of tenancy would not only increase the availability of land in the lease market but would also increase the poor people's access to land.
In the backdrop of this changing scenario, a recent policy paper, by Dr.T. Haque, formerly with India's National Institute of Rural Development (NIRD) and now associated with National Centre for Agricultural Economics and Policy Research, New Delhi, is significant. Haque concedes that in the wake of economic liberalization, there is a demand for liberalization of agricultural tenancy in order to promote diversified agricultural growth but argues that one needs to examine whether tenancy laws of various states as such constrain agricultural growth. It is particularly important to analyse, says Haque, whether liberalization of tenancy would lead to the improvement in the condition of poor tenants in all parts of the country or whether this would lead to the growth of absentee landlordism once again, and if so, what should be the safeguards provided in tenancy laws.
The core argument of those advocating tenancy liberalization is that restrictive tenancy laws have not served much purpose for either growth or equity and therefore tenancy should be liberalized. It is argued that liberalization of tenancy would increase the mobility of people from the rural to urban areas and improve the availability of land in the lease market. It is also argued that restrictive tenancy laws have encouraged landowners to often leave their lands fallow and that the ban on leasing could lead to better utilisation of land and increased farm output.
But as Haque's report (based on primary and secondary data from several states) points out "there is a danger that in the absence of adequate non-farm development, liberalization of tenancy may alienate the marginal farmers from land without an alternative source of income, particularly in the underdeveloped regions."
Confirmed land rights lead to higher productivity
Haque's study makes it clear that tenants who have confirmed ownership/occupancy right take more interest in farming. For instance, the survey results from Karnataka in southern India indicate that such people have invested in land improvement measures and raised their land productivity and socio-economic status. However conditions of certain categories of people such as widows became worse as a result of tenancy reforms. It was observed that many of the occupant-tenants as well as informal tenants preferred to borrow from local money lenders at high rates of interest because of convenience and out of fear of harassment. "This calls for credit reform in the institutional sector for streamlining and increasing the accessibility of the farmers to institutional credit which could help improve their productivity and income levels."
Another issue in Karnataka is the emergence of a water market. It is mainly the large farmers who can afford to have their own tubewells/tanks and sell water. "Since the Karnataka land reform did not focus much on the landless so far, it is time to see whether ownership of a tubewell or tank by the landless/land poor famers would help them improve their economic condition."
Haque's key findings have important policy implications. For instance, his study reveals that "Operation Barga" in West Bengal has contributed significantly to agricultural growth in that state, but states like Kerala, Andhra Pradesh (Telengana region), Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh, which have a ban on leasing out agricultural land, have failed to achieve the desired result because of concealed tenancy. In Punjab, Haryana and some other agriculturally developed pockets of the country, points out Haque, there is a growing tendency towards reverse tenancy in which large and medium farm owners lease in land from marginal and small land owners. The reasons are many:
* Non availability of sufficient capital with marginal farmers for investment in modernisation; * marginal farmers' desire to maximise income through leasing out land and wage earnings by hiring out employment both within and outside agriculture; * large farmers' desire to maximise income by expanding the size of operational holdings especially when they lack the skill or aptitude to take up non-farm activities; * and finally the population pressure which forces all landowners to look for additional income.
One of the major ways in which loopholes in land reforms can be plugged is through computerisation of land records, says an official in the ministry of agriculture in Delhi. But here again, it is a mixed record with states like Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in the south taking a lead and states like Bihar in northern India with low social indices are lagging behind.
Land reforms alone will not rid India of its vast number of the abject poor. You additionally need to spread the net of education, awareness and among those at the bottom of the ladder in the countryside. You need a national consensus on the caste system and an end to the ritual discrimination of low-castes. You need credit reform to enable the poor to get out of the clutches of the money lenders. But without the effective implementation of land reform, it is difficult to see how the lot of the rural poor can be changed. In the final analysis, land reform is not a sufficient but a necessary condition for poverty eradication.
1) Ram Dass, a resident of Baba ka Gaon village, Uttar Pradesh (in Words like Freedom, The Memoirs of an impoverished Indian family 1947-1997).
Patralekha Chatterjee is a development journalist based in New Delhi.
D+C Development and Cooperation, published by: Deutsche Stiftung für internationale Entwicklung (DSE) Editorial office, postal address: D+C Development and Cooperation, P.O. Box, D-60268 Frankfurt, Germany. E-Mail: HDBrauer at cs.com
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