Land reforms

Land reform tried to undo the unequal system left by colonial rule.

Under the British:

• In zamindari areas, landlords (zamindars) were given control of the land and collected revenue from cultivators. They extracted heavily, invested little, and farm production stagnated.
• In raiyatwari areas, cultivators paid tax directly to the government. With more security, they invested more in their land and prospered.

After independence, states passed three main kinds of land reform laws:

• Abolition of zamindari: removing the intermediaries between the state and the cultivator. This was the most effective reform, because it ended the landlords' power to collect revenue.
• Tenancy laws: to protect tenants by fixing fair rents and giving them security, or ownership. These were weak in most states, but radical in West Bengal and Kerala, where tenants actually got rights to the land they tilled.
• Land ceiling laws: fixing an upper limit on how much land one family can own, and giving the surplus to the landless. The ceiling depends on the land's quality: very productive land has a low ceiling.

Why ceiling laws mostly failed: they were toothless:

• loopholes in the laws;
• landowners divided land among relatives on paper, even through sham divorces;
• benami transfers: land put in the names of servants or others while the real owner kept control.

So land reform changed the structure, especially by ending zamindari, but inequality remains.