Land Reforms

The defects existing with Indian agrarian structure pointed out by Planning Commission, highlighted the need for land reforms. The existing system during the beginning of Planned Growth, allowed the landlord and intermediaries to grow richer and they continued to flourish at the cost of the actual tillers. The cultivator tenants had to live a very tough life. Tenant got little incentive to increase his output since a large share went to the landowner. Very small margin was left for the actual cultivator and this amount was quite insufficient to provide for a capital investment on the land. The landlords grew richer, the intermediaries continued to flourish, the state was deprived of its share of legitimate increase in revenue and the cultivator tenants were in hand to mouth existence.

In order to remove the defects with existing agrarian structure, there was need of institutional changes in holdings. A high powered committee in 1948 with J. L. Nehru as its Chairman recommended that “all intermediaries between the tiller and the state should be eliminated and all middlemen should be replaced by non-profit making agencies like cooperatives. The maximum size of holdings should be fixed and the surplus land should be acquired and placed at the disposal of the village cooperatives. Small holdings should be consolidated and steps should be taken to prevent further fragmentation".

Objectives of Land Reforms:

1. Economic efficiency: The agrarian reforms should help in removing all obstacles to achieve high agricultural productivity. They should help in creating conditions for evolving as speedy as possible, an agricultural economy with high level of efficiency.

2. Social justice: The agrarian reforms should help to eliminate all elements of exploitation and ensure social justice within the agrarian system to provide security for the tiller of the soil and assure equality of status and opportunity to all the sections of the rural population. In order to achieve these objectives, the following policy measures were envisaged: 

a) Abolition of the prevalent intermediary system between the state and the actual tillers;

b) Tenancy reforms such as conferment of ownership rights on the cultivating tenants in the land held under their possession;

c) Imposition of a ceiling on agricultural land holdings as a measure contributing to the modernization of agriculture and to eliminate parasitic absentee landlordism;

d) Rationalization of the record of rights in land so as to make the rights of tenants, share croppers and other categories of insecure landlords;

e) Consolidation of holdings with a view to making easier the application of modern techniques of agriculture;

f) Development of co-operative farming and co- operative village management.