REVIVING AGRICULTURE

Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindutwit in 1948; but that was not the end of the Gandhian movement. From 1949 onwards, Gandhians got together in Sarvodaya conferences every year. In 1951, they met in Shivarampalli near Hyderabad, and persuaded Vinoba Bhave to attend. Vinoba lived in his own ashram in Pavnar, not far from Nagpur or from Sevagram, the last ashram Gandhi set up. Vinoba walked back the 300 miles from Shivarampalli to Pavnar. On the way, he stopped at a village called Pochampalli. Like much of Andhra Pradesh, Pochampalli had a few big landlords, and two-thirds of its families were landless. On April 18, 1951, Harijans of the village went to Vinoba and said that to survive, they needed 80 acres of land, half of it irrigated, half un-irrigated. Vinoba was perplexed: where could he get land? He was thinking of approaching the government for it.

Then a landlord, Ramchandra Reddy, offered 100 acres. He had 3,500 acres, of which he eventually gave away 800. Its distribution amongst the landless was the beginning of the Bhoodan movement, which spread to other states, as well as to Sri Lanka. What happened to the land that was given? How many landless got land? What difference did it make to their lives? No one knows. It is generally believed that the Bhoodan movement petered out before long. But some interesting information has been unearthed in Bihar.

In 2004, the Bihar government appointed a land reforms commission under the chairmanship of D. Bandopadhyay, who designed the land reforms of West Bengal, perceived to have been highly successful. In 2008, the commission submitted its recommendations, the chief of which were: [1] the complicated system of land classification should be replaced by a simpler one with six different types of land, and a different ceiling on landholdings in each class should be declared; [2] the bottom fifth of rural households should each be given between 2/3 and 1 acre each, and non-farm rural workers should each be given 1/10 acre each to build a house; and [3] sharecroppers should get 60 per cent of their production if the landlord bears the cost of production and 70-75 per cent if he does not.

What the Bihar government has set out to do, beginning with the appointment of this commission, is to acquire land from landlords and distribute it to the landless. This is precisely what the Bhoodan movement had tried to do half a century earlier. Bihar passed a Bhoodan Yagna Act in 1954, which vested the donated land in a Bhoodan Yagna committee and gave it power to distribute it. So the commission had a meeting with this committee.

Bihar has an area of about 17 million hectares, of which some 10 million hectares is under cultivation. The committee received roughly ¼ million hectares — 2½ per cent of the agricultural land and 1½ per cent of the total land. It distributed about half of the land it received. About 100,000 hectares were found to be “not suitable for distribution on account of alleged improper physical characteristics of the land.” The commission was disturbed by this huge inventory of useless land; it could lead to encroachment, disputes, corruption and misuse. It was especially worked up about the case of the Hathua Raj, presumably a chieftain or little raja, who was supposed to have given a lakh acres in Gopalganj district. The local collector’s figure of total land given to the committee in the Gopalganj district was 21,000 acres; the revenue department’s figure was 10,000 acres. There was apparently no authoritative figure; all figures were inventions. The commission wanted the Hathua Raj to be locked up under some section or other of the Indian Penal Code, and wanted the government to expropriate his one lakh acres.

The first point to note is, how little land the Bhoodan committee received. Even if it had efficiently redistributed all the land it received, it would not have made much of a dent in the inequality of land distribution or in the prevalence of landlessness. To the Gandhians, means are more important than ends, so they would find this quite all right. But those who want to make a radical redistribution of agricultural land cannot afford to be Gandhians; they must believe in force.

Second, no one can have rights in land unless they are recognized by others, and enforced by some higher authority. That enforcer can only be the government. So rights in land are only those that are recognized by the government. Governments in India have repeatedly hashed up land records; but they cannot be done away with. Land redistribution can survive only if it is recognized by the government.

Hence it is more efficient for the government to redistribute land than for any private agency, let alone a voluntary redistributor like the Bhoodan movement. Bhoodan cannot redistribute land without the help of the government; the government can redistribute it without anybody’s help.

Third, whether it wants to redistribute land or not, a government must create a land record, because it alone can. But even for the government, creating a land record is a formidable operation. Its size depends on how land is parcelled out. If it had to create a record of every square metre of Bihar’s land, it would have 170 billion records. If it had to make a record of every square kilometre, it would have 170,000 records. It helps, therefore, if land is neatly divided up into rectangles, and if the rectangles have a minimum size. This is called consolidation. It was done long ago in Punjab and most of the ryotwari areas of the South and the West; the zamindari areas of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal did not have it because the zamindari estates there were enormous and it did not matter if they were of irregular shapes.

So whether Bihar has land reforms or not, it needs land consolidation. It would begin with creating a record of land rights classified by the area and quality of land of each holder. Then the land would be consolidated and classified, giving the smallest possible number of pieces of uniform quality. Then these pieces would be divided up into rectangular blocks — as small as is necessary to give back the property rights to the smallest right-holder, but large enough to permit efficient use of tractors and other farm machinery. They would still end up in a jigsaw puzzle, but it would be a lot less complicated than the present pattern of land distribution.

Bihar needs to do this type of consolidation and reorganization of the land, whether it decides to have land reforms or not. It would bring into use a lot of land wasted today in boundaries, it would bring together parcels under the same ownership and save owners much travel from one piece to another, and it would eliminate much encroachment and disputes it generates. It would make land far more readily marketable and rentable. Politicians since Independence have been sold on redistribution of land. What would be far more productive and administratively useful is consolidation of rural land. It would be an intelligent reform, worthy of Nitish Kumar.