Firstpost
Oct
9, 2018
Editor's
Note: Landlessness is increasingly becoming endemic in India's rural belt, as
over 56 percent of the rural population has no landholdings. For decades, there
has hardly been any attempt to bring in land reforms in India, even as this
critical index affects income, social security, health and education, among
other factors that impact households. This two-part series attempts to study
the gravity of the situation and suggest ways to address it. This is the first
part of the series.
The farmers may have lifted their siege and
gone away but a 25,000-strong group of landless poor are marching towards Delhi
from Gwalior with their own set of demands: a national land reform policy,
implementation of the Forest Rights Act and right to agricultural land, among
others.
The word ‘landless’ conjures up the black
and white images of a breathless Balraj Sahni running furiously on the streets
of Kolkata as he pulls his cart carrying a young man goading him to run faster
and faster to catch up with his love interest. The end is tragic, both in the
scene when one of the wheels gives in and at the end of the movie when he and
his family bid adieu and walk away from their land, Do Bigha Zamin – having
lost it to the zamindar and where a mill is coming up.
It was a classic Bimal Roy film on
landlessness in contemporary India (released in 1953) but one would be forgiven
for thinking that it was about a medieval reality, aeons away from today’s
India.
But the truth is quite the contrary.
In 1951, the ‘landless agriculture labour’
numbered just 27.3 million which went up to 144.3 million (or 14.4 crore) in
2011. The Socio-Economic and Caste Census of 2011, which acknowledged and
counted landlessness as a major indicator of poverty, put the ‘households with
no land’ at 56.41 percent of total rural households or 101 million households.
With a mean household size of 4.9 in rural India (as per the 2011 Census), the
number of landless comes to 494.9 million (or 49.49 crore).
Shocking! Well, the landless are the new
invisibles of our market-driven economy, or market driven consciousness if you
please.
It took quite some time for the enormity of
the issue to hit home in the liberalised era. In 2009, the rural development
ministry’s Committee on State Agrarian Relations and Unfinished Task of Land
Reforms pointed out that landlessness had witnessed a phenomenal rise from
about 40 percent in 1991 to about 52 percent in 2004-5. It explained why:
“While all the enhanced landlessness cannot be attributed to the liberalisation
process alone the non-agricultural demands placed on land on account of
industrialisation, infrastructural development, urbanisation and migration of
the urban rich in the rural areas have certainly contributed to the process.”
It also explained why landlessness has gone
out of economic consciousness: “The post-liberalisation era has been marked by
a debate. There is the view that the possibilities of Land Reforms have
exhausted and future growth is only to come from private investment in the
rural areas. The protective legislation act as an inhibiting factor to this
investment. Accordingly many States are proceeded to revise their legislation.
Even within the Government there was the view that distributive justice
programmes have been overtaken by development paradigm.”
It is useful to remember that this
committee was set up when the Maoist violence was at its peak with 220
districts (one-third of the total) declared as ‘Maoist-affected’ by the then
Planning Commission of India.
There is no official assessment of how many
became landless because of all the factors listed above but the report quoted
eminent sociologist Walter Fernandes’ study to peg the figure of people
disposed of their land at 60 million during the period of 1947 to 2004,
involving 25 million ha of land. The report particularly referred to the
alienation of tribal land as “the biggest grab of tribal lands after Columbus”
in which the state was held complicit. It considered alienation of land and
other critical natural resources to be at the root of the social unrest and
violence in the Maoist-affected areas.
The NSSO data shows that the average
landholding (including landless) in rural India has gone down from 1.53 ha in
1971-72 to 0.59 ha in 2013 — it halved between 1992 and 2013 — and 92.8 percent
of rural households own less than 2 ha each. It also reflects another
disturbing phenomenon -- marginalisation of rural landholdings. The larger
landholdings of 1 to 10 ha or more are gradually shrinking since 1971-72 with
more and more households falling into the marginal category (0.002- 1 ha).
How does landlessness, or marginalisation
of landholding, matter?
The 2013 draft National Land Reform Policy
provides the answer: “Landlessness is a strong indicator of rural poverty in
the country. Land is the most valuable, imperishable possession from which
people derive their economic independence, social status and a modest and
permanent means of livelihood. But in addition to that, land also assures them
of identity and dignity and creates condition and opportunities for realizing
social equality. Assured possession and equitable distribution of land is a
lasting source for peace and prosperity and will pave way for economic and
social justice in India.”
The landless are, in fact, the “poorest of
the poor” -- according to the Government of India’s own admission, for whom,
among others, it launched an insurance policy, Aam Aadmi Bima Yojana (AABY), in
2007.
Here are some more sobering facts. The 2018
UNDP-OPHI report, Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), which hailed
India for reducing poverty in the last one decade, also said that India “still
has the largest number of people living with multidimensional poverty in the
world (364 million)” – which is “higher than the combined populations of the
most populous Western European countries, including Germany, France, UK, Spain,
Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands and Belgium”. Of the 364 million MPI poor, 113
million — or 8.6 percent of India’s population — live in “severe poverty”.
Surely, the landless fall within the MPI
poor and deserve serious attention of the Delhi’s mandarins.
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