Land Tenancy in India: Need for Reforms and Safeguards

Abstract

The present era of economic liberalization, has placed small and marginal farmers at a disadvantage when it comes to participating in domestic and foreign markets. Therefore it has been argued that liberalization of tenancy would not only increase the availability of land in the lease market but would also increase the poor people's access to land. Question is whether liberalization of tenancy would lead to the improvement in the condition of poor tenants or whether it would bring back the era of absentee landlordism. In India most of the tenancies being oral and informal, it is very difficult to make an accurate estimate of the incidence of tenancy. Even after passing of tenancy laws by various states, the position of tenants, particularly of share croppers, continues to be precarious in several parts of the country. In the circumstances it is contended that there is need to plug the loopholes in the existing tenancy laws and to better implement enacted laws, rather than liberalizing tenancy and the lease market. The author in this paper advocates that land tenancy should be liberalized ONLY with adequate safeguards to protect the interests of the farmers or it is better to stick to the existing system with minor changes in the law to recognize systems of share cropping and protect the share croppers by giving security of tenure and fixation of equitable share of the crop without conferring the title to land.