In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, “wealth redistribution” was kosher. The 1974 Hindi movie Amir Garib had Dev Anand play the role of Manmohan, who has a day job as a hotel singer and, at nighttime, transforms into a masked vigilante, Bagula Bhagat, robbing the rich (amir) and spreading their ill-gotten wealth among the poor (garib).

There was a reason. India, at the time of Independence, was a highly unequal society. Much of the wealth of its people was held in the form of land. About 91.4 per cent of the country’s total annual household savings in 1950-51 was in physical assets such as land, dwellings and gold. That share declined to 71.9 per cent in 1970-71 and 60.6 per cent in 1980-81.

Moreover, a lot of this wealth was concentrated in a few hands — mainly absentee/non-cultivating landlords and intermediaries whose primary concern was to extract maximum rent from tenants, who had little surplus left for investing in land improvement or raising farm productivity. There was general political consensus, then, for land reforms. These ranged from abolition of the zamindari system of intermediaries between cultivators and the state to the imposition of land ceilings.

Zamindari abolition resulted in some 25 million erstwhile tenant-cultivators becoming owners with permanent and heritable interests in their holdings. Land ceilings, together with tenancy reforms recognising the cultivation rights of sharecroppers and granting them legal protection against eviction, led to roughly 8.3 million hectares getting effectively redistributed. That was hardly 6 per cent of the country’s cultivated area.

The mixed record on land reforms was, however, not due to any absence of political consensus. Successive five-year plan documents emphasised state actions for giving land to the tiller, which were also endorsed........

© Indian Express