The country will never be able to achieve a structural end to rural poverty without land
reforms, including redistributive measures and security of tenure and ownership, prevention
of usurious alienation from vulnerable segments of people and ownership of house sites.
Basic measures to end poverty in the countryside would also include enhanced and just access
to other natural resources, including wastelands, common lands, forests, minerals and water
bodies, and a secure safeguard of food and livelihood security including an employment
guarantee.
Since the 1990s, after the lapse of nearly three decades, there is a deeply worrying trend
of the rate of growth of population overtaking the rate of growth of agricultural
production. Unless we enhance the security and well being of the small farmer and
agricultural worker, it is unlikely that we will adequately enhance agricultural production
higher than the levels to which it is plateauing. Therefore the rationale for land reforms
is not just equity but even growth.
But the imperative for land reforms derives firstly from the Constitutional mandate for
equality before law and the primary duty of the state to ensure redistributive justice. It
is reiterated nearly sixty years after Independence in the Common Minimum Programme of the
UPA government, declared on 24 May 2004, that ‘landless families will be endowed with land
through implementation of land ceiling and land redistribution legislation. No reversal of
ceiling will be permitted’. This national policy is to redeem that resolve, and the older
pledge made by the founders of India’s secular socialist democratic Constitution.
|
