Question

Give a brief outline of land reforms in India since 1991.

Answer 1

Land Reforms usually refers to redistribution of Land from rich to poor. Land reforms include;

Regulation of OwnershipOperation, Leasing, saleInheritance of Land

In an agrarian economy like India with massive inequalities of wealth and income, great scarcity and an unequal distribution of land, coupled with a large mass of people living below the poverty line, there are strong economic and political arguments for land reforms.

Due to all these compelling reasons, Land reforms had received top priority by the governments at the time of independence. The Constitution of India left the adoption and implementation of the land reforms to the state governments. This has led to a lot of variations in the implementation of land reforms across states.

Economic Arguments in Favour of Land Reforms



Given these observations, one could make an argument in favour of land reform based not only on equity considerations but also on efficiency considerations. For example, the inverse relationship between farm size and productivity suggests that land reform could raise productivity by breaking (less productive) large farms into several (more productive) small farms. Also, lower productivity under sharecropping suggests that land reform could raise productivity by converting sharecroppers into owner-cultivators.