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Mainstream, VOL L, No 40, September 22, 2012

Official Neglect Despite Great Significance

Friday 28 September 2012

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If the most important factor in the context of poverty, hunger and the related discontent in India has to be identified in just one word, then this world undoubtedly will be ‘land’. It is injustices and distortions relating to land distribution which are the single most important cause of poverty, hunger and rural unrest not only in India but in many other countries as well.

The solution clearly is land reforms, which may be defined here as ensuring proper land rights for all the rural workers and peasants to such an extent that their sustainable livelihood is well protected. This may involve distribution of farmland, distribution of other cultivable land, protection of existing land rights of peasants and other measures.

Land scarcity is acute in India. India has 2.4 per cent of the world’s geographical area and 16 per cent of the world’s population. It has 0.5 per cent of the world’s grazing area but has over 18 per cent of the world’s cattle population. India has nearly 18 million landless farm/rural labour households, a total population of about 100 million.

In these conditions providing a secure land base to the landless and near landless peasants is of greatest significance to provide them food security and to reduce/remove their poverty.

Land reforms are an essential and extremely important component of any paradigm of development that sincerely wants to remove poverty and provide food security in the conditions prevailing in India.

After independence India’s land-reforms efforts started with the aim of helping landless farm toilers to become small peasants owning small plots of farmland. Seventy years later we can see that this effort did not succeed—the achievements are so small as to be negligible. On the reverse side, there is a much more massive drive to turn small and middle peasants into landless workers. This takes the form of massive displacement, land-grab, indebtedness, high costs, ecological ruin and other forms. This is perhaps the biggest tragedy of India’s agricultural experience that the noble aim of helping the landless farm workers to become farmers got reversed into the harsh reality of turning farmers into landless workers.
Therefore any comprehensive land-reforms effort should include both these essential components—providing land to the landless peasants and protecting the land rights of the existing farmers.

Such a land-reforms effort can be more useful than any other programme in reducing poverty, increasing productivity, ensuring food security as well as bringing peace and justice to the Indian villages. What is more, such a programme can create the most enthusiastic mass base for a programme of ecological regeneration.
The Planning Commission has expressed its agreement with this key role of land reforms. In the Tenth Plan document the Commission stated: “In an economy where over 60 per cent of the population is dependent on agriculture, the structure of land ownership is central to the well-being of the people.”

While acknowledging the crucial importance of land reforms, this official document also admitted the government’s growing reluctance (even opposition) to take up this important task, “Land reforms seem to have been relegated to the background in the mid 1990s. More recently, initiatives of State governments have related to liberalising of land laws in order to promote large-scale corporate farming.”
The report of the Working Group on Land Relations for Formulation of the Eleventh Five Year Plan (the WGLREP Report) stated even more frankly: “There are serious concerns that the phase of economic liberalisation may be accompanied by further erosion of land-reforms.”

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