UPSC Mains 2016 GS Paper 3 Q9: model answer

Abolishing zamindari in the early 1950s brought an estimated 2 crore tenants into direct contact with the state, without a landlord in between. It was the largest legal transfer of rights over land in modern India.

Components

• Abolition of intermediaries: zamindari, jagirdari and inamdari.
• Tenancy reform: rent regulation, security of tenure, ownership for tenants.
• Ceilings on holdings and distribution of surplus land.
• Consolidation of fragmented plots.

Role in agricultural development

• Incentive: the tiller keeps the gain, so he invests.
• Consolidation in Punjab, Haryana and western UP made tubewells and tractors viable and paved the way for the Green Revolution.
• Credit: titles opened bank lending.
• Social change: weakened feudal power, built a class of owner-cultivators.

Where they succeeded

• Kerala: tenancy abolished through the Land Reforms (Amendment) Act, 1969.
• West Bengal: Operation Barga recorded sharecroppers from 1978.
• Jammu and Kashmir: the Big Landed Estates Abolition Act, 1950, transferred land without compensation.

Factors of success

• Political will backed by peasant movements.
• Accurate records and a willing administration.
• Panchayats and village committees to identify tenants.
• Speed, before landlords could evade through benami transfers.
• Judicial cover: placing the Acts in the Ninth Schedule shielded them from early challenges.

Where they failed

Ceilings in Bihar and much of the north yielded little land, because records were poor and landlords sat in the legislatures.

Where the state and the peasant moved together, land reform worked; where only the law moved, it stayed on paper.