A recent study shows that West Bengal is a leader with respect to redistribution of land to Dalit and Adivasi households.
West Bengal is a State where policy efforts have been directed to distribute land to the landless and the poor, and specifically to Dalits, Adivasis and other deprived social groups, and also to issue joint title deeds to men and women. Some of the social-distributive effects of the land reform programme show up in recent village-based research and analyses of secondary data. These show that West Bengal is a leader with respect to the distribution of agricultural and homestead land to Dalit and Adivasi households, and also with respect to the purchase of agricultural land by the rural poor, including Dalit households.
The village-level data come mainly from a series of village surveys conducted by Vikas Rawal and others in 2005 in seven villages in different agro-climatic zones in West Bengal (a study in which this writer participated).
The villages studied were: a predominantly tribal village of West Medinipur district, two villages from the agriculturally prosperous Barddhaman district, two traditional agricultural villages from Malda and Koch Bihar districts, a village in Uttar Dinajpur where tea is grown on individual holdings, and a prawn-cultivating village in the estuarine region of North 24 Parganas.
First, let us consider the redistribution of crop land to the landless and rural poor. In five of the seven villages the redistribution of land was an important component of land reform. For each of them, this writer constructed a simple Index of Access to agricultural land. This Index measures the share of Dalit households (or other social groups) in total land ownership, weighted by their share in total population. Thus, if Dalit households constitute 20 per cent of the total population and they own 20 per cent of the land in the village, the Index of Access is 1. Where the Access Index is less than 1, it represents a situation in which the proportion of Dalit households in the population is greater than the share of total land that they own.
Our data show that in three of these five villages, the Access Indices for Dalit households were 1.49, 1.28 and 1.21; in other words, their share in land ownership was greater than their share in the population. In the predominantly Adivasi village in West Medinipur, more than 60 per cent of Scheduled Tribe households gained agricultural land and almost 75 per cent of households gained agricultural or homestead land through land reform. In the last village (in Malda district), the Access Index was lower, that is 0.5, because the main recipients of land in the village were income-poor households from the Tanti caste, which is classified as an Other Backward Class (OBC).
By way of comparison, according to data from the Land and Livestock Holdings Survey conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), the Access Index for Dalits in rural India as a whole was only 0.5. The NSSO data tend to confirm our village results, since they show that the Access Index for Dalit households in West Bengal was 0.8 (unfortunately, the most recent data in this regard are from 1992; more recent results from the 2003-04 survey are yet to be released). This is the highest Access Index for Dalits among the States of India after Tripura (where the proportion of Scheduled Castes in the rural population is smaller than in West Bengal).
Secondly, let us consider the distribution of house-site or homestead land, which is an important component of land reform in West Bengal. Ownership of homestead land means not only a place to live and a changed position in society, but also represents access to a new source of potential nutrition and livelihood support as a result of house-site and kitchen-garden cultivation. In all the seven study villages, we found that the Dalit and Adivasi households were the major beneficiaries of this aspect of land reform. Out of 210 households that gained homestead land, 21 per cent were Dalit, 46 per cent were Adivasi, 24 per cent were Muslim, and 10 per cent belonged to other caste groups. Of the last group, a majority belonged to the OBCs.
Thirdly, let us consider the participation of the poor in land markets. A 2001 study by Vikas Rawal of land markets in two West Bengal villages published in the international journal Economic Development and Cultural Change reported noteworthy results. The study showed that while empirical studies in other States had found that the net buyers of cultivable land were large landowners and the net sellers of agricultural land were small landowners, the trend was quite the opposite in the West Bengal villages that were studied. The major buyers in these two villages of Bankura district were landless households and small landowners. The paper attributed this difference to the increased purchasing power among the poor in West Bengal facilitated by land distribution, tenancy reform, higher wage rates, and access to credit.
The present study confirms and adds a new dimension to this conclusion. Five villages of the seven have significant Dalit populations. In four of them, Dalit and Muslim households were net buyers of land, while caste Hindus were net sellers. The acquisition of ceiling-surplus land by the Government of West Bengal for redistribution was and still remains a major disincentive for large landowners to purchase land.
The recent policy document on land use of the Government of West Bengal says that the State is poised for "advance into a new phase of industrial modernisation... and diversification into different forms of non-agricultural economic activity." If such a policy is indeed to succeed, West Bengal will have been among the few States of India where industrialisation and economic diversification are based on the achievement of a socially broad-based land reform.
Aparajita Bakshi is a Junior Research Fellow at the Indian Statistical Institute working on issues of household incomes in rural West Bengal.
Critique of article Index of Equity on Land Distribution in West Bengal
By Aditi Sarkar,
By Aditi Sarkar,
Aparajita Bakshi (2007) in her recent article Index of Equity constructs, in her own words, “a simple index of access to agricultural land” to claim the “socially broad based land reform” achievements by the government of West Bengal. This article professes the great strides that the government of West Bengal has made in achieving equality by enacting its policies of distributing land among the Dalits and the Adivasis.
Equity was measured simplistically as some combination of the fraction of land owned by certain under-privileged groups compared to the size of these groups to the total population. Even if this measure was called land-distribution equity, instead of equity index, it is ill-conceived. It does not, for example, factor in fundamental qualities of the land like soil type, its arability and its proximity to irrigation facilities.
The main point of this critique, however, is to show how the “simple” construction of an index of land distribution has been conflated with the much more complex and larger idea of equity. This is important, since Ms. Bakshi does not name her article Agricultural Land Access Index as would seem natural and true to her work, however ill-conceived. It is rather named Index of Equity, a term that has connotations of some grand index of justice to humanity.
Ms Bakshi implies two definitions of equity in her article, neither of which is true. First, she implies that equity means equal access. Second, she implies that equity is achieved by equal distribution of a commodity. Equity is unfortunately a complex concept that cannot be defined so simply.Equity is related to equality; but one needs to understand the difference between the two.
Equality is “an ideal, a moral imperative and a sociological datum, a legal principle and a social norm” (Boorstim, 1953). Whatever equality is, it is well accepted as something that can not and should not be practiced in most spheres of public policy. An example should clarify why equality is off thepolitical agenda for several years now. Suppose a rural bank in India offers equal opportunity loans to men and women to start small businesses based on their earnings. In a society where historically women either have had no salaries or are paid less then men for the same work and have no properties in their names, this egalitarian rule would make it impossible for a woman to obtain a loan. Public policy thus needs to be equitable and not equal.
In Inequality Reexamined Amartya Sen (1992) confronts the “heterogeneity of human beings” and “the multiplicity of variables in terms of which equality can be judged” to clarify the complexity of the matter. At a minimum, equality can be judged to have seven dimensions (Boles, 1986). A necessary condition for an index to appropriately measure equity would be to take into account all the dimensions of equality.
One of the fundamental dimensions of equality is the “distribution of prestige and social status within the larger society” –something that can not be ignored when talking about the Dalits and the Adivasis.
The six other dimensions mentioned here are also vitally important and none can be ignored. “Freedom of speech, association and petition, equal access to public office, and fair and free elections,” considered “political equality” is the second dimension of equality.
“Equality of income, job security and personal autonomy” is the third dimension of equality. Equality of access that implies “differential physical, political, juridical and economic barriers to approaching, entering, obtaining and making use of the full range of goods and services to the society” is the fourth dimension of equality.
It is worthwhile to note at this point that in Ms. Bakshi’s index of access to agricultural land none of the aspects of equality of access, mentioned above, is considered.
Equality of influence, power and control that refers to “the pattern of agenda building, office holding, and decision making in society” that is denied to the lower castes in India is considered the fifth dimension of equality. Juridical equality, where “individuals must receive equal treatment from government through a system of [local] and [national] courts dedicated to impartial adjudication and enforcement of legal equality” is the sixth dimension of equality. Last but not the least, distributive equality, requiring “apportionment of goods and services,” is touched upon very lightly by Ms. Bakshi, is the seventh dimension of equality. It is only when all of these dimensions are taken into account, together with the innate heterogeneity of human beings, that one may form an index of equity. Until then let us not conflate simple one-dimensional measures of land distribution to the complex multi-dimensional ideals of equity.
The nature of justice, and hence equity, has been debated since the time of Socrates. Rawls (1971), one of the foremost scholars of more recent times, defined it as “the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.” It maybe time for Ms. Bakshi to bring some thought to her system of constructing indices. I leave it upon her to decide to whom and by how much she would like to be true.
Bibliography
Bakshi, A. (2007). Index of equity. Frontline, 24(7).
Boles, J. K. (Ed.). (1986). The Egalitarian City: Issues of Rights, Distribution, Access and Power. New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney: Praeger
Boorstim, D. J. (1953). The Genius of American Politics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Rawls, J. (1971). The Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sen, A. (1992). Inequality Reexamined. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
References on Land Distribution in West Bengal:
1. Dipankar Basu, EPW: April 21, 2001
Author’s conclusion :
Though it cannot be denied that the land reforms had some beneficial impact on the peasantry in West Bengal (if compared to say Bihar or Orissa or MP), it was rather limited. Most importantly, the lion’s share of the benefit was cornered by the middle peasants; the agricultural labourers did not gain much. It was this emerging middle peasants that formed the bulwark of CPI(M) rule in rural West Bengal; they hegemonised the rural proletariat and small/marginal farmers through the party apparatus. Another interesting fact which is not known widely is that most of the land redistribution took place BEFORE the LF government came to power in 1977, i.e., most of the benefits came because of the radical movement of the agricultural workers andsmall peasants led by the Naxalites and not because of the LF government. If anything, the LF government put brakes on the movement and thereby consciously limited the possible scope of land reforms.
2. Paper by Anirban Dasgupta
Author’s conclusion:
“…the land redistribution undertaken by the LFG has been very limited in scope. Although it involves a sizable portion of the population dependent onagriculture, the amount of land redistributed has been meager. As a result, the agrarian structure in rural WB has not witnessed any significant change compared to the pre-reform period. Our analysis of ownership distribution of landholdings provides evidence that the level of concentration of land ownership has remained almost unchanged in the one and a half decades since the resumption of land distribution in 1977. The actual deterioration in the distribution of operational holdings (if the NSS estimates are accepted) since the LFG policies imply that the presence of tenancy has only managed to exacerbate the inequality in the access to land.”
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