This National Land Policy will seek to ensure that all state governments restore the agenda of land reforms to the centrality of public policy measures to end poverty and achieve a more egalitarian society. It would contain several measures to create a more equitable production base in rural society, giving impetus both to the ending of rural poverty as well as agricultural growth with equity. Some of the most important features of this policy include:

1. Reduced statutory ceilings on agricultural land holdings in the light of enhanced land productivity, particularly where assured irrigation has been provided; strict enforcement of ceiling laws by plugging of all loopholes including benami transactions; ending all exemptions to religious, charitable, educational and industrial organisations and units; and fast track courts that function as land tribunals at tehsil and district levels upwards.

2. Allotment of government revenue land to the landless poor with the highest priority to the SC & ST who constitute the largest number of landless agricultural labourers.

3. A drive with accountability at the highest levels of the administration to give actual possession to allottees of ceiling surplus and government lands, and single window provisions for both applications and grievance redressal for land allocations and possession.

4. Bearing in mind the rightful access especially of the poor to common property resources and the imperatives of sustainable agricultural growth, identifying land including wastelands for land development and redistribution to the rural landless poor and marginal farmers, especially SCs, STs and single women headed households.

5. Ensuring women’s rights of inheritance to all agricultural and homestead lands, and women’s title to all allotments of ceiling surplus and government lands. These should be done exclusively in the names of all adult women in any household, and should be heritable by daughters and sons equally.

6. Ensuring tree pattas (or rights to usufruct and of harvesting both timber and non timber forest produce) over non-cultivable and forest wastelands to SC, ST and single women headed households, converging NREGA wage payments for the same households for the period of gestation.

7. Ensuring recording of all agricultural tenants, regulating the levels of permissible tenancy rent, abolishing sub-tenancy, and making tenancy rights non-alienable and heritable.

8. Strengthening the laws and implementation of these laws to prevent land alienation from STs, and restoration of lands fraudulently and exploitatively expropriated from them since Independence; and the extension of such laws to also protect land ownership by SCs.

9. Ensuring rights to house sites as a legal guarantee to all rural and urban households. Rural households may be guaranteed a minimum of 5 decimals of homestead land. If they are in existing possession of such homestead land, it must be settled legally in the names of the adult women of that household, regardless of whether it is on government or private land. In case they are homeless, they must be allotted a minimum of 5 decimals of homestead land by local panchayats in a maximum time frame of one year. The same guarantee must apply to homeless residents and migrants in urban areas, who must be allotted in the same time frame by the relevant municipal local body a minimum of 300 square metres, on interest free instalments with no requirement of down payment.

10. Ensuring a legally enforceable national rehabilitation policy that supersedes the Land Acquisition Act, 1894, which includes provisions for informed challenge by affected people of the public purpose of acquisition and the absence of non displacing alternatives for that public purpose, social cost benefit analysis, compulsory provision of irrigated land to every displaced household, and compensation and rehabilitation for loss of shelter and livelihoods rather than only assets.

11. Modernisation and computerisation of land records management for greater transparency of land records.

12. The establishment of a National Land Commission by an Act of Parliament, headed by the Prime Minister of India, and with members who have high credentials and long experience of working on land reforms within and outside government, to oversee and report annually to Parliament and all state legislatures about the progress in implementation of this National Land Policy.