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Consolidation is vital by Surinder Sud

There are numerous debilitating factors that disallow Indian agriculture from growing to its potential. The most critical of them, which, ironically, are not receiving due attention, are related to land. Not only is the availability of land for farming shrinking, but its quality and fertility are also waning. Agricultural holdings are getting smaller and turning uneconomical to operate.

The much-hyped land reforms have, right from the beginning, been misdirected. These have focused primarily on enforcing the ceiling on land holdings, whereas the real issues have been the steady decline in the average farm size and an unabated fragmentation of agricultural holdings.

Official numbers indicate that the average size of operational agricultural holding in the country shrank from 1.69 hectares in 1985-86 to a mere 1.33 hectares in 2000-01. Worse still, the proportion of marginal landholdings (less than one hectare) rose from 57.8 per cent in 1985-86 to 62.3 per cent in 2000-01. Besides, about 19 per cent other holdings fall in the “small farms” category, measuring between 1 and 2 hectares. Thus, the small and marginal holdings together constitute a whopping 81.3 per cent of the total land holdings.

Most of these small and marginal holdings are further divided into tiny pieces of land. Some of the pieces are so small that even a plough cannot operate there. The farmers owning such lands have little incentive to invest in land development measures, such as creation of irrigation facility, land levelling, and curing soil abnormalities like salinity or alkalinity.

Therefore, the most urgent land reform that is needed today is consolidation of land holdings. It needs to be borne in mind that it was the consolidation of land holdings in the 1950s and early 1960s in Punjab, which then included Haryana as well, that had resulted in the mushrooming of tubewells, paving the way for the fertiliser- and irrigation- dependent green revolution technology to take root there.

The inheritance laws in most states are such that they result in division of land not only among the brothers but also the sisters, including married sisters, whose husbands normally live and till lands elsewhere. This is not only accentuating the process of fragmentation of land holdings, but is also swelling the number of absentee landlords.

Apart from this, the policies governing absentee landlordism and, more importantly, land leasing, are far from conducive to agriculture. A sizeable chunk of absentee landowners is wary of leasing out its lands to tenants for cultivation. These landowners fear that the tenants may get the land “pattas” (ownership rights), depriving them of their land. The result is that such land often remains uncultivated, needlessly sacrificing the output that could have been obtained from these lands.

This particular issue can be addressed by legalising land leasing, thereby protecting the interests of both landowners and tenants. However, the issue of inheritance is somewhat tricky. Some farmers’ organisations have suggested that the inheritance laws be amended to give a married woman the right to the agricultural land belonging to her father-in-law, instead of her father. With this, the land inherited by her husband and by her would at least remain in the same village, maybe as contiguous plots as well. However, the social implications of such a move need to be considered and, perhaps, debated as well, before finalising a policy option. But the issue can no longer be left unaddressed.

Moreover, there is a policy vacuum on some other critical land-related issues. Besides being unfair to farmers, the current policies concerning land acquisition, rehabilitation and compensation are not framed to suit agriculture. There are a lot of instances where good agricultural lands are acquired for non-agricultural purposes. This is reducing the overall availability of land for farming, besides forcing the farmers to extend crop cultivation to the pieces of land that should, at best, be left for agro-forestry or grazing.

There is an urgent need to adopt a land-use policy based on the capability of the land concerned. Much of the country’s total land mass has already been surveyed and classified into different agro-climatic zones. The results of soil surveys are available for knowing the quality of land and its suitability for different purposes. Only the lands that are unfit for crop production should be allowed to put to non-agricultural use. Unless we guard the land, the future of Indian agriculture cannot be secure.