Land Reforms in India

Land Reforms & Duty Of State:
“Verify, The Land Belongs To Him Who Labours On It”
Changes brought about in the agrarian structure through direct intervention are characterised as land reforms. It incorporates the changing of laws, regulations regarding land ownership. Land reforms are an attempt by the Government to achieve social equality and optimum utilization of land by redistributing the land holdings. These reforms are intended to eliminate exploitation and social injustice within the agrarian system, to provide security for the tiller of the soil and to remove obstacles arising from the agrarian structure that has been inherited from the past.

It is the scheme of the government wherein it redistributes the property, generally, of an agricultural land. Land reform, therefore, refer to transfer of ownership from the more powerful to the less powerful, such as from a relatively small number of wealthy (or noble) owners with extensive land holdings (e.g. plantations, large ranches, or agribusiness plots) to individual ownership by those who work the land. Such transfers of ownership may be done with or without compensation; compensation may vary from token amounts to the full value of the land. It implies that it is a transfer of ownership from the strong to weak such as from the owners with huge chunk of land who is relatively smaller in number to the individuals who actually work on the land. And also while transferring compensation may not be necessarily given to the landlords and if it was given it varied from state to state.

At the time of independence, India inherited a semi-feudal agrarian system, wherein the ownership and control of land was vested in the hands of a small group of landlords and intermediaries whose main intention was to extract maximum rent, either in cash or kind, from tenants. Henceforth, a cultivator with no security of tenure and was required to pay a huge amount of revenue was least interested in investing in land. At the...