It's time to give back land to original tillers

Forces unleashed by the Land Reforms Act in 1970 have caught landlordism by the scruff of its neck but still has not managed to edge out inequality. If the first land reforms attempted to take over land from the upper class, we require a second one to give back land to the original tillers of the land who were left out in the first revolution.   Highly exploitative land relations existed in Kerala during the pre-Independence era. Nonetheless, land relations were quite distinct in Malabar and Kochi-Thiruvithamcore areas. In Thiruvithamcore and Kochi, the control was centralised in the hands of kings. In Malabar, on the contrary, land-related patronages were distributed by local chieftains. Exploitation was therefore more oppressive in the Malabar region.

However, in both these regions there was a three-tier hierarchy. At the top were landlords, mostly from the upper class. Then there were the tenants, to whom land was leased out by landlords; they were mostly of the intermediate communities like Ezhavas and Muslims. At the bottom were agricultural labour, mostly from scheduled castes and tribes. Rents paid by tenants to landlords were hugely exploitative but landlords thought nothing of extracting even two-thirds of the produce as their share. Tenants then held on to the little margin left by squeezing the poor agricultural labour blank. It is this exploitative, caste-propelled agrarian links that the Left movement sought to overthrow. Reforming land relations, therefore, was the main agenda of the EMS Ministry, unified Kerala’s first ministry.

The Marxist government’s revolutionary fervour was reflected in the Agrarian Relations Bill, piloted in 1959. It sought to give fixity of tenure to all tenants including hutment dwellers. Even tenants evicted after 1956 were entitled to have their position retained. Within 48 hours direct action was launched against the government, smothering the Bill. The land reforms in the form we know today came into force on January 1, 1970. Tenancy was abolished, agricultural labour were given title deeds to their hutments, and a 15-acre ceiling was imposed on land holdings. However, not a leaf of the huge plantations was disturbed. Some of the reasons trotted out for exempting plantations were that they employed a huge labour force, and also that they needed to achieve economies of scale.

It was not as if plantations alone were not available for redistribution. Landed gentry, anticipating a Communist victory in the first elections, had long before launched efforts to take control over the land in their possession. Evictions became the order of the day; even close relatives were forced out of land leased out to them. As a consequence, when land reforms actually came into force over a decade later, only 25,000 hectares was distributed among the landless. This was just 3.2 percent of the 7.82 lakh hectares of surplus land originally available for redistribution in 1957. Nonetheless, land reforms struck at the root of landlordism. Not only did tenants get permanent tenure over the land they had leased but they also transformed into landlords overnight. Almost simultaneously, there was a cooperative revolution in the state; primary agricultural cooperative banks expanded in a big way.

This further freed tenants and poor farmers from their traditional dependence on landlords and other exploitative non-institutional means of finance. Intriguingly, despite easy access to credit and improvement in technology, forces of agricultural productivity in the state were not let loose. This was mainly because of changes in land ownership. There was a massive shift to cash crops, and land began to be viewed as a commercial asset. Remittances played a big role in this transformation. Land was suddenly seen not as a means of production but as a speculative commodity. Gulf wealth poured mostly into land, and the real estate economy took shape. Result: land prices soared higher than even commodity prices. Social advancements, too, ironically held back the promised gains of land reforms. Better education, for instance, alienated the younger generation from agriculture. Better road connectivity, too, has prompted people from the mainland to travel deep into the villages to purchase land.

The asset aura around land quickened the slicing of land into smaller blocks. Land got fragmented beyond recognition. These days 60 percent of the land holdings in the state are below one acre. Title deeds for up to 10 cents given to hutment dwellers gave them a roof over their head, but nothing more. As their families grew, even the little they had, had to be fragmented. Now, their land has either got divided into invisible patches or three to four generations of a family cramp together in 150-200 sq ft of space inside state-sponsored hutments. Land reforms might have reduced exploitation but it has not reduced inequality. Those at the bottom of the hierarchy, unlike the intermediate group of tenants, did not get control over land.

The original tillers lost out. Landlessness is now the new scourge. Agitations for land by the landless have become a common occurrence. For them, the original tillers, land is not an asset to be sold in the market for the highest price but it is their lifeline, their only means of livelihood. On the one hand large swathes of land are left fallow; over two lakh hectares is left fallow in the state. While on the other, a landless lot are desperate for a patch of land for subsistence living. It is time to relook land reforms. It is time to reverse the prohibition on leasing out land, and tenancy should be legalised. It is also time to relook land reforms in relation to other natural resources. It is time to relook the unregulated construction on wetlands so that our natural resources just don’t dry up.

(The writer is economist and former director of Centre for Development Studies)