Land Reforms in India

At Independence, India's agrarian structure was marked by a small number of large landholders (often absentee) and a very large number of tenants and landless labourers with insecure rights over the land they worked. Land reforms were the set of policy measures aimed at changing this structure in favour of the actual cultivator. Indian land reform policy is generally described in terms of four components.

Abolition of intermediaries is generally regarded as the most successfully implemented of the four components — the zamindari-type systems were formally abolished across most of the country within a decade or two of Independence, bringing a very large number of former tenants of intermediaries into direct contact with the state.

Tenancy reforms and land ceiling laws, by contrast, saw much more uneven implementation. Regulating rents and giving tenants security of tenure was often resisted by landowners, and enforcement varied considerably from state to state; likewise, land-ceiling surplus that was legally supposed to be redistributed was, in many states, far below what would have been expected given landholding patterns — a mix of legal loopholes, benami transfers (land registered in others' names to evade the ceiling), and weak administrative enforcement limited the reach of ceiling laws.

Consolidation of holdings made progress in some states (notably parts of northern India) but again did not achieve uniform coverage nationally. …