Shaping India

Economic Change in Historical Perspective

D. Narayana,Raman Mahadevan

• Editorial: Routledge India
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000084047
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Business General

This volume seeks to unravel and contextualize the so-called dichotomy of 'old' and 'new' India and what binds them together. To understand this complex process, it attempts to apply a long-term historical perspective, a different conception of the economy and cross-disciplinary approaches.

The exceptional feature of this volume is the large historical canvas of essays and its sensitivity to the regional dimension in a country as large and diverse as India. They deal with issues ranging from land and agriculture, entrepreneurship, industry and demographic trends to a critical anatomy of modern Indian economic historiography. Together these essays contribute in providing significantly new and enriching insights into the complex process of transition from colonial to post-colonial economic development. There has been a conscious effort in most cases to capture the influence of the colonial economic structures and processes in shaping the trajectory of growth and development in the post-independence period. Drawing upon a large amount of extremely rich and varied data and information on the socio-economic trends, the book is lucid, well-crafted and reader-friendly.

PART I
Land and Agriculture

The institution of property rights, especially rights over land, appears as an important analytical category in numerous discussions of growth and development. But a systematic account of the evolution of land rights in the specific context of India is hardly to be found in the literature. ‘Evolution of Land Rights in India’ by S. Neelakantan fills this important gap. Through most of Indian history, landownership was very unequal, as the upper castes owned the land and the lower castes tilled it for them. The British introduced different systems of land tenure in different parts of India: the raiyatwari system in Madras, Bombay and Berar; the permanent settlement system in parts of Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Benares and Madras; and the mahalwari system in most of the United Provinces, Central Provinces, Punjab and parts of Agra and Oudh. They also extinguished the traditional land rights of the adivasis, and customary use was deemed a ‘privilege’ and not a ‘right’. Following direct administration in 1858, the British transplanted their principles of jurisprudence into India, which brought transparent and codified legal procedures into the subcontinent. But it also gave pervasive powers to the revenue department over landowners and tenants.

The Indian constitution declared the right to property a fundamental right, and the framers of the constitution conferred land rights and land reforms as state subjects. State legislatures passed legislation abolishing intermediary tenures, and raiyatwari became the uniform tenure of independent India. Land reform legislations were also passed by all states, but the operative clauses were difficult to enforce, escalating the transaction costs. Effective land reforms eluded large parts of India as a result of conflicting interests under the democratic process. The caste dimension too played a part: most landlords belonged to non–Scheduled Castes, while the Scheduled Castes were the most significant segment tilling the land. Successful implementation of land reforms would have resulted in land passing into the hands of Scheduled Castes; want of political will prevented this from taking place.

Extinguishing the rights of the adivasis and taking over forests as government land meant displacing them from their traditional homes. The government acquired tribal land for the construction of dams, the establishment of industries, extraction of minerals, wildlife protection and so on. It is only in recent years that some attempts have been made to restore their traditional rights to the adivasis, either through the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act of 1996, or through the Forest Dwellers Restoration of Rights Act of 2006. But the distance between legislation and implementation remains large.

The discussion of the evolution of land rights gestures towards the issue of unequal distribution of land in India. This theme of land distribution is taken up for detailed analysis by K. N. Nair and Arindam Banerjee in ‘Structural Changes in Land Distribution and Their Implications for Improving Access to Land’. Concentration of land as measured by the Gini coefficient is high in the Indian states and has increased over the years. Part of the reason for the high concentration is historical—the conferring of land rights on intermediaries by the British—and ecological—the poor moisture regime inhibiting the breaking of land without draught power. The counter-argument has been that concentration did not increase, as population pressure and land subdivision have worked against it. The number of rural households more than doubled between 1960 and 2000, and the average size of ownership holding fell by more than half. The proportion of small and marginal holdings has increased and the share of area owned by the bottom 60 per cent of households has come down. This pattern may be seen in almost all the states, except Kerala. Land reforms have played a role in the changes in land distribution. However, there are significant inter-state differences in the effectiveness of land reforms. While tenancy reforms have been impressive in West Bengal, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Kerala and Karnataka, implementation of ceiling laws has been effective in Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal. The impact of land reforms in reducing poverty and improving the socio-economic status of the beneficiary households is well documented.

As land reforms have had limited impact on land redistribution, it is important to focus on the broader socio-economic and political forces that have shaped agrarian relations in India. This is taken up in the chapter by A. Vaidyanathan, ‘Changing Agrarian Structure in India: Reflections on Pre-independence Ideology and Post-independence Reality’. Early settlement reports reveal that landownership was concentrated among the upper and middle castes; the lower castes were either tenants or labourers. This pattern began to change from the early 20th century. As out-migration by the upper castes increased, opportunities were opened for the middle and lower castes to acquire land. These trends are observable in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

The wider diffusion of landownership among different social groups, and the advent of electoral politics and its extension to local governance, have given greater voice to the underprivileged segments of society. The uneven incidence of benefits of new agricultural technology and the persistent gap between people’s rising expectations and actual improvements have led to caste-centric social tensions. A resolution of these tensions is essential for improving the efficiency and accountability of rural development initiatives.

Population pressure on land is associated with falling land–person ratios. At the macro-level, it shows up as the growing number of small farmers, and at the micro-level, that is, at the level of the household, one of the responses has been labour intensification. A synthesis of the Indian experience based on such an understanding is provided in the chapter by N. Krishnaji, ‘Population Pressure and Labour Intensification: An Indian Historical Perspective’. The Indian population has been increasing at 2 per cent per annum since independence, but the net sown area has increased by only 0.2 per cent per annum, leading to considerable falls in holding size. A majority of peasant households cultivating holdings of a size that cannot fully support their families cling to their land by a ‘tightening of the belt’, as well as by supplementing their incomes through wage work. One may also observe an inverse correlation between land–person ratios and land productivity by virtue of the higher use of labour and other means of improving productivity. During the late colonial period as well, some regions experienced pressure on land with substantial declines in land–person ratios. The ‘adjustment’ to such pressure has been labour intensification.

The Indian green revolution has been credited as an example of the contributions of science and technology to agriculture. The science and technology establishment, guided by the state over a long period, has come under scrutiny in recent years for its failure to benefit rural populations and the environment. The contribution by Rajeswari S. Raina, ‘Institutional Strangleholds: Agricultural Science and the State in India’, explores the gamut of issues surrounding the agricultural research system in India. State-sponsored agricultural research existed in India much before it emerged in Europe. Several organizational formats and types of interactions continued till the mid-1960s. The initial centralization came about with commodity committees, but a decisive turn was taken in 1966 with the direct responsibility to coordinate and conduct research conferred on the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. With the bulk of funding flowing from the central government, scientific and bureaucratic authority was consolidated. Along with numerous other public sector organizational components, price support and input subsidies, agricultural science became the key to addressing food security. Large farmer lobbies became the economic actors at the centre of this schema. Agricultural science increasingly became centralized, serving as a handmaiden of food security, in the process losing whatever space existed for objective research, as well as losing relevance to the rural agrarian problems of small farmers and highly diversified agriculture.

Chapter 1
Evolution of Land Rights in India

S. Neelakantan

Through most of Indian history, upper castes have controlled the land, while the lower castes have tilled it for them. In spite of a surfeit of land reform legislation after independence, inequality in landownership at the national level has not been dented. This is a clear indication of the failure of these legislations. China and Japan also had very unequal distribution of land, but tenancy was widespread in these countries. Land reform legislations there could redistribute ownership successfully to tenants. In contrast, tenancy in India was much less widespread. Cultivation based on bonded or wage labour, dictated by the caste system, has been the norm. In post-independence India, the composition of absentee owners, owner-cultivators, tenants and wage labourers has resulted in a very complex caste–class configuration. The formulation of land reform laws and their implementation became blunted by the free play of conflicting interests that the democratic process allows. Similarly, the centuries-old customary land rights of forest dwellers had been abrogated arbitrarily during British rule. After independence, the democratic process could not restore these right fairly or fully. A major part of this complex situation may be unravelled only by tracing the evolution of land rights in India, the focus of the present article.

Land Rights in India before the British

Manu’s Hindu code gave ownership rights to the first person who cleared the land for cultivation. The interpreters of Manu’s code prescribed different modes of acquisition for the different varnas (Pal, 1958; Sen, 1918). Succession, gifts of affection and marriage presents were common modes of acquisition for all castes. Special modes of acquisition for Brahmins recognized by the law were the acceptance of free gifts, performance of priestly duties and receipts from disciples; for Kshatriyas, revenue, gains of war and penalties imposed by law; for the Vaisyas, agriculture, herdsmanship and commerce; and for the Sudras, service to the aforesaid three castes.

In the pre-Gupta period, agriculture was a mode of acquisition permitted to the Vaisya varna only. After the 5th century A.D., custom overrode the shastric law and all the four varnas were granted the right to ownership of land. However, only persons belonging to the Sudra varna and avarnas (untouchables) would actually cultivate the land. The other three superior varnas considered it beneath their dignity to soil their hands with manual labour in cultivating land. The avarnas or untouchables had no prescribed mode of acquisition recognized by the law. This vindicates an observation attributed to Veblen: ‘Under serfdom and slavery those who work cannot own and those who own cannot work.’ As a result, a sizeable portion of the actual cultivators of land had no ownership rights.

The Hindu law extended rights of inheritance to ancestral property to only the male members of a Hindu coparcenary. The Hindu coparcenary is a unique system of joint property in which the father is restricted by his sons, the brother by his brothers and the women by their successors in the enjoyment of property. Individual property is the rule in the West; corporate property is the rule in the East (Maine, 1953). The Hindu law relaxed its rules in favour of persons whose kulachara (caste occupation) was commerce, and permitted the karta (head) to pledge joint family properties to raise funds; the creditor was presumed to have lent the sum for trade purposes. There existed different systems of succession, such as dayabhaga in Bengal and the adjoining areas, mayukha in Bombay, Konkan and Gujarat, marumakkattayam or nam...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Land and Agriculture
• Part II Entrepreneurship and Industry
• Part III Demographic Trends
• Part IV A Critical Theoretical Perspective
• About the Editors
• Notes on Contributors
• Index