India After Independence: 1947-2000 (62 page)

It needs to be added here that while attempting to improve the condition of the tenants, tenancy legislation in India by and large sought to maintain a balance between the interest of the landowner, particularly the small landowner and the tenant. The absentee landowners’ right of resumption of land for ‘personal cultivation’, which was granted in most parts of India, as well as the tenants’ right to acquire the lands they cultivated, was operated through a complex and variable system of ‘floors’ and ‘ceilings’ keeping this balance in view.

The landowners’ right of resumption was limited (this was aimed at the large landowners) to his total holding after resumption not exceeding a certain limit or ceiling prescribed by each state. The First Plan suggested a limit of three times the ‘family holding’. A family holding inter-alia was defined as a single plough unit. Also, while resuming land the landowner could not deprive the tenant of his entire lands. In some states like Kerala, Orissa, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, the tenant had to be left with at least half his holding. In some other states like Bihar the floor was half the holding of the tenant or a minimum of five acres (in West Bengal two and a half acres), whichever was less.

Conversely (and this was aimed at the small landowner), the tenants’ right to acquire the landowner’s lands was restricted by the condition that the landowner was not to be deprived of all his lands and that the tenants’ holding after acquisition was not to exceed the ceiling prescribed by each state.

It was recognized, as the Second Plan noted that, ‘The economic circumstances of small owners are not so different from those of tenants that tenancy legislation should operate to their disadvantage.’
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The Plan therefore envisaged that very small landowners could resume their entire holding for self-cultivation. However, the actual experience of implementation of the tenancy laws was more complicated. As P.S. Appu, who headed the Planning Commission Task Force on Agrarian Relations (which reported in 1973) noted, the provisions introduced to protect the small landowners were misused by the larger landlords with the active connivance of the revenue officials.
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The Third Plan also pointed out the abuse of such provisions by large landowners transferring their lands in names of a number of relatives and others so as to enter the category of ‘small landowner’ and then evicting tenants from such lands by exercising the right of resumption given to small owners.
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In fact, the right of resumption and the loose definition of ‘personal cultivation’ referred to earlier (initially only Manipur and Tripura made personal labour by the landowner a condition of resumption for personal
cultivation) was used for eviction of tenants on a massive scale. The process of eviction had actually begun in anticipation of the imminent tenancy legislations. The inordinate delays in enacting and implementing the legislations were engineered by vested interests enabling them to evict potential beneficiaries before the law came into force.

Even after the tenants got legal protection against eviction, large-scale evictions occurred. For example, the Planning Commission’s Panel on Land Reforms noted in 1956 that between 1948 and 1951 the number of protected tenants in the State of Bombay declined from 1.7 million to 1.3 million, i.e., by more than 23 per cent; in the State of Hyderabad between 1951 and 1955 the number declined by about 57 per cent. Another detailed study of Hyderabad showed that out of every 100 protected tenants created in 1951, after four years, i.e., by 1954, only 45.4 per cent maintained that status; 12.4 per cent became landowners by exercising their right to acquire land; 2.6 per cent were legally evicted; 22.1 per cent were illegally evicted and 17.5 per cent ‘voluntarily’ surrendered their claims to the land. Voluntary surrenders by tenants was really an euphemism for illegal eviction as most often the tenant was ‘persuaded’ under threat to give up his tenancy rights ‘voluntarily’. So common was the practice that the Fourth Plan was constrained to recommend that all surrenders should only be in favour of the government, which could allot such lands to eligible persons. However, only a handful of states acted upon this recommendation.

Before proceeding further on the failures of tenancy legislation in providing security of tenure to a large section of tenants, it is extremely important to also recognize that a substantial proportion of tenants did acquire security and permanent occupancy rights. The detailed study of Hyderabad referred to in the previous paragraph after all shows that 45.4 per cent of the tenants remained protected tenants and 12.4 per cent became owners, i.e., in sum about 67.8 per cent of the tenants brought under the legislation no longer suffered from insecurity. This was an important development with ramifications on levels of investment and improvement in productivity in the lands of such ‘secure’ tenant cultivators.

In many cases tenancy legislations led to tenancy being pushed underground, i.e., it continued in a concealed form. The tenants were now called ‘farm servants’ though they continued in exactly the same status. In the early years of land reform, tenants were often converted to sharecroppers, as surprisingly the latter were not treated as tenants and therefore were not protected under the existing tenancy legislation in some states such as in U.P. Only cash rent payers were treated as tenants and not those who paid fixed produce rents or those who paid a proportion of total produce as rent, i.e., sharecroppers. In West Bengal the 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. A spurt in the practice of share-cropping in the immediate years after 1951 can partially be explained due to this factor, that sharecroppers had no tenancy rights.

Perhaps what contributed most to the insecurity of tenants, was the fact that most tenancies were oral and informal, i.e., they were not recorded and the tenants therefore could not benefit from the legislation in their favour. However, going only by the recorded tenancies the 1971 Census reached absurd conclusions such as that 91.1 per cent of cultivated area in India was owner-operated and that Bihar had the largest percentage of area under owner cultivation for, any state, i.e., 99.6 per cent and that in Bihar tenancies constituted only 0.22 per cent of operational holdings and 0.17 per cent of total cultivated area! This, when it is commonly accepted that Bihar had a very high proportion of tenancy, the 1961 Census quoting a figure of 36.65 per cent. The discrepancy between the 1961 and 1971 Census figures would suggest that the overwhelming majority of the tenancies were unrecorded and consequently the tenants remained insecure. The 1961 Census estimated that 82 per cent of the tenancies in the country were insecure!

The absence of proper records, for example, was seen as a major impediment in the implementation of the Zamindari Abolition and Land Reform Act in U.P. in the initial years after independence. A massive drive had to be launched by Charan Singh, the then revenue minister to get a few million records corrected or newly inscribed.

In later years, in certain areas, other such drives were launched, often under the hegemony of left forces, and the targeted beneficiaries were no longer only the upper and middle tenantry but also the poor, totally insecure and unprotected sharecroppers and tenants at will. Some celebrated examples of such efforts were seen in Kerala and West Bengal.

In the late sixties a massive programme of conferment of titles to lands to hutment dwellers and tenants was undertaken in Kerala. The programme, which achieved considerable success, was launched with the active participation of peasant organizations.

The Left Front government in West Bengal which came to power in June 1977 launched the famous Operation Barga in July 1978 with the objective of, in a time-bound period, achieving the registration of the sharecroppers, so that they could then proceed to secure for them their legal rights, namely, permanent occupancy and heritable rights and a crop division of 1:3 between landowner and sharecropper. Out of an estimated 2.4 million bargadars in West Bengal only 0.4 million were recorded till June 1978. However, after the launching of Operation Barga the number of those recorded rose from 0.7 million by October 1979 to about 1.4 million by November 1990.

A significant aspect of the Operation Barga experiment in West Bengal was that, like in Kerala, an effort was made to mobilize the support of the rural poor and especially the targeted beneficiaries (the bargadars) and their active participation was sought in the implementation of the reform measures. This went a long way in neutralizing the lower level revenue officials like patwaris, etc. who often acted as major impediments in the successful implementation of government programmes. An innovative move of the West Bengal government aimed at both giving
a voice to the rural poor and changing the attitude of the revenue officials was to start a number of orientation camps while launching Operation Barga, ‘where 30 to 40 agricultural workers and sharecroppers and a dozen and a half officers of Land Reform and other related departments were made to stay together, eat together and discuss together in the same premises in distant rural areas.’
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Though Operation Barga did lead to recording of a large number of sharecroppers and consequently providing them with security of tenure, the process could not be completed and it reached more or less a stalemate after a little more than half the sharecroppers had been covered. This was because of some significant reasons. First, it was found politically unviable, just as it was ethically indefensible, to proceed with Operation Barga when faced with ‘landlords’ who themselves were cultivators with holdings only marginally larger, if even that, than that of the sharecroppers; landlords who were entitled to only one-fourth of the produce, the rest being the sharecroppers’ share. As it has been noted that in West Bengal where over time the overwhelming majority of the cultivators were small cultivators controlling less than five acres, a further redistributive thrust was difficult. ‘The “class enemy” had dissolved into a sea of small holdings.’
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The dilemma was the same as the one that was faced in other parts of India, i.e., the need to balance the interest of the small landowner and the tenant. As mentioned before, tenancy legislation in India generally anticipated this aspect and had provisos built into the legislation which addressed the problem.

The other problem was that such was the land-man ratio in Bengal that the landlord was often able to rotate a piece of leased land among two or more sharecroppers or bargadars, i.e., for each piece of land there could be more than one bargadar claiming tenancy rights. Registering any one would permanently oust the other. Also, if all the bargadars were registered in such a situation the size of the holdings per cultivator would threaten to go way below the optimum. There were, thus, political and economic limits to how far Operation Barga could be carried; the objective situation did not permit the full implementation of the notion of ‘land to the tiller’ or even the provision of full security of tenure to each cultivator.

Thus, the first objective of tenancy legislation in India, that of providing security of tenure to all tenants met with only limited success. While a substantial proportion of tenants did acquire security (many even became landowners, as we shall see presently) there were still large numbers who remained unprotected. The partial success stories such as those of Kerala and West Bengal notwithstanding, the practice of unsecured tenancy, mostly oral, whether taking the form of share-cropping or the payment of fixed produce or cash rent, continued in India on a large scale. It is the continued existence of large number of insecure tenants which, inter-alia,
made the successful implementation of the second major objective of tenancy legislation, that of reducing rents to a ‘fair’ level, almost impossible to achieve. The market condition, e.g., the adverse land-man ratio that developed in India during colonial rule, pushed towards high rents. Legal ‘fair’ rents in such a situation could only be enforced in the case of tenants who were secure and had occupancy rights; i.e., they could not be removed or changed.

Legislation was enacted in all the states regulating the rent payable by cultivating tenants. Most states fixed maximum rents at levels suggested by the First and Second Plan, i.e. to 20 to 25 per cent of gross produce. Some states like Punjab, Haryana, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh (coastal areas) fixed maximum rents somewhat higher, ranging between 33.3 and 40 per cent. In practice, however, the market rates of rent almost in all parts of the country tended to be around 50 per cent of gross produce. In addition the tenant often ended up bearing the cost of the production inputs either fully or to a substantial extent. Further, the Green Revolution which started in some parts of India in the late sixties aggravated the problems with land values and rentals rising further and reaching, for example, in parts of Punjab, rates as high as 70 per cent. What made matters worse was the fact that it was only the poor insecure tenants or sharecroppers who paid the market rates of rent. Only the upper stratum of the tenantry, which had secured occupancy rights, and was often indistinguishable from a landowner, was able to enforce the payment of legal rates of rent.

As for the third objective of tenancy legislation in India, i.e., the acquisition of ownership rights by tenants, this too was achieved only partially. As we saw above, in some detail, the use of the right to resumption by landowners, legal and illegal evictions, ‘voluntary’ surrenders, shift to oral and or concealed tenancy, etc., eroded the possibility of achieving this objective adequately. Yet, it must be noted quite a substantial number of tenants did acquire ownership rights.

Unfortunately, detailed data on this aspect for the whole country is not available. However, certain case studies of specific regions may serve as an indicator. P.S. Appu wrote in 1975 that, according to ‘latest information’, in Gujarat out of about 1.3 million tenants ownership rights had been purchased by more than half, namely about 0.77 million; and in Maharashtra out of 2.6 million tenants, again about half, namely, 1.1 million had acquired ownership rights. In other states, too, a substantial number of tenants did become owners, their numbers adding up to a few million.
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(It must be remembered that this is in addition to the 20 million odd tenants who became landowners as a result of the abolition of intermediaries in zamindari areas). It has been argued that one reason why even a larger number of tenants did not acquire ownership rights was that for a large number of tenants who had acquired permanent occupancy rights and achieved rent reduction, there was hardly any motivation to try and acquire full ownership which would involve not only raising capital (albeit only a fraction of the market value of land) but legal and other complications. These superior tenants were for all practical purposes virtual owners.
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