Agrarian Reform in India had been adopted to reallocate the agricultural resources among all the people directly connected with agriculture. After independence, the Government of India started the process of building equity in rural population and improvement of the employment rate and productivity. So for this reason the Government had started agrarian reform.
Reasons Behind Agrarian reform:
- Since India had been under several rulers for a long time, i.e right from the beginning of the middle age, that's why it's rural economic policies kept changing. The main focus of those policies was to earn more money by exploiting the poor farmers.
- In the British period the scenario had not changed much. The British Government introduced the "Zamindari" system where the the authority of land had been captured by some big and rich landowners called Zamindar. Moreover they created an intermediate class to collect tax easily.
- This class had no direct relationship with agriculture or land. Those Zamindars could acquire land from the British Government almost free of cost. So the economic security of the poor peasants lost completely. After independence, the Government's main focus was to remove those intermediate classes and secure a proper land management system. Since India is a large country, the redistribution process was a big challenge for the Government.
Objectives:
According to agrarian reform land was declared as a property of State Government. So agrarian reform varied from state to state. But the main objectives of agrarian reform in India were:
- Setting proper land management,
- Abolition of Intermediaries
- Preventing fragmentation of lands,
- Tenancy reform.
The land policies of different states faced several controversies . In some state the reform measures were biased in favour of th big land owners who could wield their political influence. However, agrarian reform in India had set a healthy socio-economic structure in the rural areas.
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