4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
resumption of land by landlords had been restricted;4
(iv) about 3 million tenants and share-croppers had acquired ownership of more than 7 million acres of land;5 and,
(v) laws imposing ceiling on agricultural holdings were enacted in almost all the states between 1958 and 1962 and over 2.3 million acres of land had been declared surplus in excess of the ceiling limits. The state governments took possession of about 1.6 million acres of surplus land. Tenants, uneconomic holders and landless agriculturists were being settled on these lands.6
Attempts were also made to make us believe that some of the more patent blemishes of agrarian relations had been removed,7 and that the agrarian structure had become more rational and equitable8. It is true that land reform measures like abolition of intermediaries and tenancy reforms shed away some of the feudal characteristics of the agrarian relations in India, and thereby some better-off sections of the peasantry had been relieved of their feudal burdens. A definite change took place in the rural property structure. Some of the landlords having loose connection with their land had been removed from the property structure, while some of the erstwhile absentee landlords came back to the village. Acquisition of proprietary rights by the tenants in their land encouraged them to take to agriculture much more seriously than when the land was in the hands of intermediaries. In fact in the last two decades a major change was that agricultural land passed more and more to the hands of those who took a more active interest in agriculture. Thus one of the main recommendations of the Congress Agrarian Reforms Committee that land must belong to the tiller had been 'implemented5 in the sense that only those persons who had been tilling the lands of others as tenants and not those who had been cultivating the lands of their employers as wage workers were considered to be tillers.9
This, however, does not necessarily mean that the agrarian structure has really become more rational and equitable. The benefits of the laws for security of tenure could not be fully reaped by a large body of tenants, mainly because of the right of resumption for personal cultivation granted to the landlords in many of the states. The landlords who came back to the villages often leased out part of the land they owned, under various forms of open and disguised tenancy, taking extreme care to forestall any kind of permanent rights to the tenants. Many informal share-cropping arrangements had been in existence in different parts of the country. There had been forcible evictions of tenants through devices such as voluntary surrenders. Statutory rent or the share of the crop payable by the tenant to the landlord was still high in some areas. All these were not the features of a rational agrarian structure. The claim that the Indian agrarian structure had become more equitable would only mean closing one's eyes to the ugly reality that the avowed objective of reducing inequalities in landholding had been dealt with in a cavalier fashion as a result of which the excessive concentration of landownership remained,