essay on land settlement
Answers
in colonial role
The Grant of Diwani empowered the East India Company to collect revenue from the occupied territories of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. For a trading organization like the Company, extraction of maximum revenue was considered as the higher profit. While fixing the land revenue, interest of the peasants was never taken into consideration.
On the other hand, for an agricultural country like India, economic development depended upon the improvement of agriculture and prosperity of agrarian class. But from the very beginning the burden of taxation fell heavily on the peasants.
They had to pay for trade and profits of the company, for wars of expansion and for the cost of administration. Land revenue was viable source to maximize revenue collection and to make every Indian a tax payer. Early land revenue policy of the company had disastrous effects on the peasants and the experiments of Clive and Warren Hastings compounded their woes. Even the peasants deserted the villages and gave up cultivation of land due to tax burden. The land revenue policy made the Company administration stable and its economy healthy. But it left the peasants in deplorable condition and ultimately broke the economic backbone