Land reform and the Green Revolution

The first principle

At independence most Indians lived off land they did not own, and the country could not feed itself. The new state therefore had two tasks that pulled in different directions: to make agriculture fairer by taking land from absentee intermediaries and giving security to the tiller, and to make it more productive so that India would not depend on foreign grain. Land reform was the answer to the first task and the Green Revolution to the second. The first was pursued through law and met political resistance, while the second worked through technology and prices and succeeded quickly but unevenly, which is why their combined record is one of food security achieved and equity left incomplete.

The core

Why land reform came first

• Colonial revenue systems, above all the Permanent Settlement, had placed zamindars and other intermediaries between the state and the cultivator. They extracted rent without investing, so tenants had neither security nor reason to improve the land.
• Peasant anger was real. The Telangana armed struggle (1946 to 1951) against the Nizam's regime and the landlords (deshmukhs) of Hyderabad State showed that if the state did not redistribute land, movements on the ground would try to do so by force.

The four instruments

• Zamindari abolition. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madras and other States passed laws around 1950 to remove intermediaries, with compensation paid to them. By the late 1950s intermediaries had been largely abolished across the country, and tenants of the State now dealt directly with it. When the Patna High Court struck down the Bihar law in 1951 on grounds of equality, Parliament passed the First Amendment (1951), which added Articles 31A and 31B and created the Ninth Schedule to protect land laws from challenge; the Fourth Amendment (1955) made the amount of compensation non justiciable.
• Tenancy reform. Laws sought to regulate rent, give tenants security of tenure and a right to buy the land they tilled. Because most tenants were unrecorded oral lessees, landlords evicted them through so called voluntary surrenders.
• Land ceilings. States fixed a maximum holding and were meant to distribute the surplus to the landless. Weak drafting, high ceilings, exemptions for orchards and plantations, and transfers to relatives and benamis meant little land was declared surplus, so national guidelines in 1972 lowered the ceilings and made the family the unit.
• Bhoodan. On 18 April 1951 at Pochampalli in Telangana, Vinoba Bhave received the first gift of land, and the movement gathered pledges of lakhs of acres. Much of it was poor or never distributed, but it offered a Gandhian alternative to force.

Cooperative farming and the limits of politics

The Congress session at Nagpur in January 1959 called for ceilings and cooperative joint farming. Opposition from peasant proprietors, voiced by Charan Singh, and from conservatives such as C Rajagopalachari, who founded the Swatantra Party that year, buried the idea. The landowning castes at the Congress base would accept the end of zamindari but not deeper redistribution.

Where States went further

• Jammu and Kashmir. The Big Landed Estates Abolition Act, 1950 set a ceiling of 22.75 acres and transferred the excess to tillers without compensation, the most radical early reform.
• Kerala. The Kerala Land Reforms (Amendment) Act, 1969, in force from 1 January 1970, ended landlordism, made tenants owners and gave hutment dwellers rights to their house sites.
• West Bengal. Operation Barga, launched in 1978, recorded the names of sharecroppers (bargadars) through village camps, which gave more than a million of them legal protection and a fixed share of the crop.

The food crisis and the Green Revolution

• Droughts in 1965 and 1966 cut foodgrain output sharply, and India imported millions of tonnes of wheat under the United States Public Law 480 (PL 480) programme, a "ship to mouth" existence that invited political pressure.
• Food and Agriculture Minister C Subramaniam backed the new strategy; M S Swaminathan at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) tested the dwarf wheat varieties bred by Norman Borlaug in Mexico, and India imported about 18,000 tonnes of Mexican seed in 1966. The High Yielding Varieties Programme began in 1966.
• The package needed assured water, chemical fertilisers, pesticides and credit, and a guaranteed price. The Agricultural Prices Commission (1965) announced minimum support prices (MSP), and the Food Corporation of India (FCI), set up in 1965, bought grain and built buffer stocks.
• Results came first in the irrigated wheat areas of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, and reached rice in the 1970s.

Dimensions

• Economic. The two policies together moved India from food deficit to self sufficiency in wheat and rice,, creating commercial peasant proprietors.
• Political. Zamindari abolition destroyed a class that had backed colonial rule and gave the Congress a rural base, while the new middle peasants later became an independent force behind leaders like Charan Singh.
• Social. Intermediate castes gained land and status, while the landless, mostly Dalits, gained little.
• Constitutional. Land reform began the long contest between Parliament and the courts over property.

In practice

Key judgements

• Shankari Prasad v Union of India (1951): upheld the First Amendment and held that Parliament could amend Fundamental Rights.
• Kesavananda Bharati v State of Kerala (1973): arising from Kerala's land laws, held that Parliament cannot alter the basic structure of the Constitution.
• I R Coelho v State of Tamil Nadu (2007): laws placed in the Ninth Schedule after 24 April 1973 can be tested against the basic structure.

Data

Foodgrain output rose from about 51 million tonnes in 1950 to 51 to about 108 million tonnes by 1970 to 71, and wheat output roughly doubled in the decade after 1965.

Two short cases

• Kerala. A long tenant movement and Communist led governments produced India's most complete abolition of landlordism.
• Punjab. Consolidated holdings, canals, the Punjab Agricultural University (1962) and assured procurement made it India's granary within a decade.

Issues and way forward

• Weak ceilings. Ceiling laws failed because landowners dominated State legislatures and the revenue machinery; computerised land records and the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (Ministry of Rural Development) address the record gap that made evasion easy.
• Insecure tenants. Concealed tenancy continues because tenancy is banned or restricted in many States; the NITI Aayog Model Agricultural Land Leasing Act, 2016 recommends legalising and recording leases.
• Inequality. The Ministry of Home Affairs study of 1969 on agrarian tensions warned that gains were going to larger farmers in irrigated areas while tenants and labourers lagged, which fed unrest; the Bringing Green Revolution to Eastern India programme (2010) aimed to spread the gains.
• Ecological cost. A wheat and paddy cycle backed by free power and assured procurement has drained groundwater in Punjab and Haryana; the M S Swaminathan led National Commission on Farmers (2004 to 2006) urged an "evergreen revolution" that raises output without ecological harm, through crop diversification and water saving.

Common confusions

• Zamindari abolition and land ceilings. Abolition removed the intermediary layer between State and cultivator; ceilings limited how much land any owner may hold. The first largely succeeded and the second largely failed.
• Bhoodan and Gramdan. Bhoodan was the gift of individual plots; Gramdan, which followed from 1952, was the gift of a whole village's land to the village community.
• Green Revolution and White Revolution. The Green Revolution raised foodgrain output through new seeds; the White Revolution, Operation Flood from 1970 under Verghese Kurien, raised milk output through dairy cooperatives.

For the exam

• Keyword bank: intermediaries, zamindari abolition, Ninth Schedule, tenancy reform, voluntary surrender, land ceiling, benami, Bhoodan, Nagpur resolution, Operation Barga, PL 480, high yielding varieties, minimum support price, buffer stock, evergreen revolution.
• Previous year questions: Practise the previous year questions on this topic →
• Use in an answer:
  • Introduction (data): India's foodgrain output rose from about 51 million tonnes in 1950 to 51 to about 108 million tonnes by 1970 to 71, turning a country that lived "ship to mouth" into one that fed itself.
  • Introduction (judgement, quote or report): The First Amendment of 1951 and its Ninth Schedule were written to protect land reform laws, showing how central agrarian change was to the new republic.
  • Conclusion: Land reform ended the zamindar but not landlessness, and the Green Revolution ended famine but not inequality, so the task now is secure tenancy and sustainable productivity.
  • Conclusion: Consolidation in the economy meant both feeding the people and giving the tiller a stake in the land, and India achieved the first more completely than the second.