British land tax system completely exploited the Indians how
Answers
Answer:Under this system , the government authorised a small group of large revenue payers to collect the land tax
Explanation:
D. Murali
CHENNAI:, JULY 17, 2010 10:26 IST
UPDATED: JULY 17, 2010 10:26 IST
One of the elaborate essays that Amiya Kumar Bagchi includes in ‘Colonialism and Indian Economy’ (www.oup.com) is on ‘land tax, property rights, and peasant insecurity in colonial India.’ Analysing the case of the Bombay Deccan districts in the nineteenth century, the author rues that the problem of a vulnerable ecology and uncertain peasant production can be compounded by state policies regarding property rights and taxation.
While the British rulers in India are credited with the introduction of the concept of generalised private property into the Indian legal system, there was a conflict because land taxes also financed colonial conquest and rule in India, feels Bagchi.
The result, as he explains, was that whereas in Britain the nature of property rights held by a person in land often determined the extent to which, and the form in which he was subject to taxation, in India it was the form of the land tax that determined the nature of property rights in land. “It also determined the kind and the degree of security a person with such tax-determined property rights enjoyed in his property.”
Zamindari and raiyatwari
The two main systems of land taxation then, as you may know, were zamindari and raiyatwari. The former was the so-called Permanent Settlement or the Cornwallis system, enforced in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, the first really large territory the British conquered in India, the author informs.
Under this system, the government authorised a small group of large revenue payers to collect the land tax from the occupiers or cultivators of land and then pay most of it into the government coffers, after retaining a portion (initially authorised to be ten per cent of the revenue) as the reward for their trouble, he adds.
The system is better known as ‘zamindari’ because ‘it was only in the case of these large revenue-payers (who were usually called zamindars in British documents) that the quantum of tax on a given piece of land was fixed permanently.’
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