Land leasing laws & Land Act Reforms भूमि सुधार कानून की आवश्यकता- for Doubling Farmer's Income

Land leasing laws & Land Act Reforms

भूमि सुधार कानून की आवश्यकता- for Doubling Farmer's Income

Land leasing laws relating to rural agricultural land in Indian states were overwhelmingly enacted during decades immediately following the independence. At the time, the abolition of Zamindari and redistribution of land to the tiller were the highest policy priorities.

There are six main categories of reforms: Abolition of intermediaries (rent collectors under the pre-Independence land revenue system); Tenancy regulation (to improve the contractual terms including the security of tenure); A ceiling on landholdings (to redistributing surplus land to the landless); Attempts to consolidate disparate landholdings; encouragement of cooperative joint farming; settlement and regulation of tenancy Land Reforms in India after Independence: Purposes and Features. Land reforms programmes in India includes: Abolition of Intermediaries, Tenancy reforms, consolidation of holdings and determination of holdings per family and to distribute surplus land among landless peoples NITI Aayog has proposed legalising agricultural land leasing and widening the use of such land for all kinds of crop activities, horticulture, and food processing. The Aayog will soon unveil a central Model Land Leasing Act that will supersede all existing land laws in states, which will have to emulate the central legislation, sources in NITI Aayog said on Thursday. “Legalising land leasing in all areas will ensure complete security of land ownership right for the land owners ..

Land leasing laws relating to rural agricultural land in Indian states were overwhelmingly enacted during decades immediately following the independence. At the time, the abolition of Zamindari and redistribution of land to the tiller were the highest policy priorities. Top leadership of the day saw tenancy and sub-tenancy as integral to the feudal land arrangements that India had inherited from the British.

Therefore, tenancy reform laws that various states adopted sought to not only transfer ownership rights to the tenant but also either prohibited or heavily discouraged leasing and sub-leasing of land. In trying to force the transfer of ownership to the cultivator, many states abolished tenancy altogether. But while resulting in minimal land transfer, the policy had the unintended consequence of ending any protection tenants might have had and forced future tenants underground. Some states allowed tenancy but imposed a ceiling on land rent at one-fourth to one-fifth of the produce. But since this rent fell well below the market rate, contracts became oral in these states as well, with the tenant paying closer to 50% of the produce in rent. The original intent of the restrictive tenancy laws no longer holds any relevance.

Today, these restrictions have detrimental effects on not only the tenant for whose protection the laws were originally enacted but also on the landowner and implementation of public policy. The tenant lacks the security of tenure that she would have if laws permitted her and the landowner to freely write transparent contracts. In turn, this discourages her from making long-term investments in land and also leaves her feeling perpetually insecure about continuing to maintain cultivation rights. Furthermore, it deprives her of potential access to credit by virtue of being a cultivator. Landowner also feels a sense of insecurity when leasing land with many choosing to leave land fallow. The latter practice is becoming increasingly prevalent with landowners and their children seeking non-farm employment.

Therefore, the introduction of transparent land leasing laws that allow the potential tenant or sharecropper to engage in written contracts with the landowner is a win-win reform. The tenant will have an incentive to make investment in improvement of land, landowner will be able to lease land without fear of losing it to the tenant and the government will be able to implement its policies efficiently. Simultaneous liberalization of land use laws will also open up an alternative avenue to the provision of land for industrialization that is fully within the state’s jurisdiction and allows the landowner to retain ownership of her land. A potential hurdle to the land leasing reform laws is that landowners may fear that a future populist government may use the written tenancy contracts as the basis of transfer of land to the tenant and therefore would oppose the reform. This is a genuine fear but may be addressed in two alternative ways. The ideal way would be yet another major reform: giving landowners indefeasible titles. States such as Karnataka that have fully digitized land records and the registration system are indeed in a position to move in this direction. For other states, such titles are a futuristic solution. Therefore, in the interim, they can opt for the alternative solution of recording the contracts at the level of the Panchayat eschewing acknowledging the tenant in the revenue records. They may then insert in therelevant implementing regulations the clause that for purposes of ownership transfer, only the tenancy status in revenue records would be recognized. State governments must seriously consider revisiting their leasing (and land use) laws to determine if they could bring about these simple but powerful changes to enhance productivity and welfare all around

Manmath Biradar

manmathbiradar@gmail.com

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