The Indian Government was committed to land reforms and to ensure distributive justice as was promised during the freedom struggle. Consequently, laws were passed by all the State Governments during the Fifties with the avowed aim of abolishing landlordism, distributing land through imposition of ceilings, protection of tenants and consolidation of land- holdings.

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Post-Independence: Institutional reforms

There were three major steps taken to ensure distributive justice in India:-

1. Abolition of intermediaries like zamindars, jagirdars etc.
2. Tenancy Reforms i.e. regulation of the rent, security of tenure for tenants and conferment of ownership on them.
3. Ceilings on the size of landholdings.

• Impact of these Reforms

The first phase also called the phase of institutional reforms continued till the early 1960s.

• The most successful of all reforms were the abolition of intermediaries like zamindars.
• Tenancy reforms were most successful in Kerala and West Bengal.
  • In the late 1960s a massive program of conferment of titles to lands, to hutment dwellers and tenants were highly beneficial.
  • Operation Barga: In West Bengal Operation Barga was launched in 1978 with the objective of achieving the registration of sharecroppers and provide them permanent occupancy and heritable rights and a crop division of 1:3 between landowner and sharecropper.
• Cooperatives and community development programs were started.

• Weakness of Phase-1 reforms
  • The absence of adequate land records made implementation of these acts difficult.
  • Zamindars resorted to large-scale eviction of tenants, mainly the less secure small tenants.
  • Even after the laws were enacted the landlords used the judicial system to defer the implementation of the laws.
  • Zamindars refused to hand over the land records in their possession, forcing the government to go through the lengthy procedure of reconstructing the records.
  • Bureaucratic Apathy: Implementation of the law was made difficult with the collusion between the landlords and lower-level revenue Officials.
  • Tenancy Reforms: Even today 5% farmers hold 32% of land holdings.
    • The right of resumption and the loose definition of ‘personal cultivation’ was used for eviction of tenants on a massive scale.
    • Voluntary surrenders by tenants also took place as they were ‘persuaded’ under threat to give up their tenancy rights ‘voluntarily’.
    • In West Bengal sharecroppers, known as Bargadars received no protection till as late as July 1970, when the West Bengal Land Reforms Act was amended to accord limited protection to them.
    • Most tenancies were oral and informal and were not recorded.
    • Providing security of tenure to all tenants, met with only limited success. There were still large numbers who remained unprotected. So reducing rents to a ‘fair’ level was almost impossible to achieve.
  • Ceiling reforms
    • Exemption to land held by cooperatives was open to great misuse with landlords transferring their lands to spurious cooperatives.
    • In most states the ceilings were imposed on individual and not family holdings, enabling landowners to divide up their holdings in the names of relatives or make benami transfers merely to avoid the ceiling.
    • Further, in many states the ceiling could be raised if the size of the family of the landholder exceeded five.
    • A large number of exemptions to the ceiling limits were permitted by most states following the Second Plan recommendations that certain categories of land could be exempted from ceilings.
  • Consolidation of holdings: The programme failed to achieve its desired objective because the farmers are reluctant to exchange their lands for the new one. The arguments given by the farmers is that there existing land is much more fertile and productive than the new land provided under land consolidation.

• Phase-ll Reforms: It was during the mid 1960s Green Revolution was ushered in.

• Land Record Digitization : To address the property fraud, the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (DILRMP) was launched by the government of India in August 2008.
• The main aim of the program, was to computerize all land records, including mutations, improve transparency in the land record maintenance system, digitize maps and surveys, update all settlement records and minimize the scope of land disputes.

• Failure of Phase-ll reforms
  • Although the government wants complete digitisation of land records, due to the lack of clear and sufficient data and mismanagement between the various agencies handling land records, the data registered at various government levels is not identical.
  • Statistics from the DILRMP show that in most states, the digital land record database has not been synced with the digitised land registration database.

Current status

• Niti Aayog came up with the Model Agricultural Land Leasing Act, 2016. To review the existing agricultural tenancy laws of various states, the NITI Aayog had set up an Expert Committee on Land Leasing headed by T Haque.
  • The model Act seeks to permit and facilitate leasing of agricultural land to improve access to land by the landless and marginal farmers.
  • It also provides for recognition of farmers cultivating on leased land to enable them to access loans through institutional credit.
  • The Prime Minister’s Office has set up a Group of Ministers (GoM) to resolve differences over the proposed Model Agricultural Land Leasing Act, 2016.
• The National Land Records Modernization Programme (NLRMP) was launched by the Government of India in August 2008, aimed to modernize management of land records, minimize scope of land/property disputes, enhance transparency in the land records maintenance system, and facilitate moving eventually towards guaranteed conclusive titles to immovable properties in the country.
• Currently land acquisition is governed by the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 which came into force on January 1, 2014.
  • Prior to this, the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 governed land acquisition.
• Some of the most interesting work of sorting out the land titling mess has been done by state governments, as has been the case with labour law reforms as well.
• Digitization: First, the Bhoomi Project in Karnataka led the way even before the Union government got into the act. The state government began to digitize land records at the turn of the century.
  • Second, the Rajasthan legislature passed the Rajasthan Urban Land (Certification of Titles) Act in April 2016.
  • Third, Andhra Pradesh has taken a leap into the future. Its state government has tied up with a Swedish firm to use new blockchain technology to prevent property fraud.
• Tamil Nadu became the first state to pass Contract Farming Act, as per the central guidelines.

Conclusion

India’s economy has already crossed $2.9 trillion and is the 5th largest economy in the world. But these figures cannot hide the fact that 69% of the population is rural, and 70% of this, or nearly half of all Indians, still depend on land and land-based activities for their livelihoods, as per the India Rural Development Report 2012-2013. Hence, the government must commit to rural development by addressing landlessness with the same vigor that it has shown towards urban development. Land rights therefore help rural families achieve independence and break out of the cycle of poverty. They also eventually enhance agricultural production.