LAND REFORMS 51
country. Such tenancy arrangements have not only resulted in the perpetuation of social and economic injustice but have also become insurmountable hurdles in the path of the spread of modern technology and improved agricultural practices. Thus the overall assessment has to be that programmes of land reform adopted since Independence have failed to ^bring about the required changes in the agrarian structure.'98
While these land reforms have been a dismal failure with regard to the promises they held out, it is idle to pretend that they have had no impact whatsoever on the agrarian structure in the country. They also aimed at achieving certain limited objectives like refoiming ^the old-type feudal landlordism by inducing the landlords to break up and partition their big estates among their kith and kin, to sell some of their ^surplus9 lands to the peasants and to take to personal cultivation and supervision of their farms more and more through employing hired labour and farm servants, instead of ^unrestricted9 renting of their lands to the tenants as practised earlier....'94 In fact the land reform measures along with certain other measures by the government—like the introduction of HYVs, pumping cheap institutional credit to the rural rich and so on-resulted in the super-imposition of capitalist exploitation on the old feudal system.
A large number of studies, including official evaluation reports, have documented the failures—as well as the reasons for these failures— of the land reform acts in the country after Independence* We do not propose to go into the details here. Our limited objective in this paper is to evaluate certain land reform acts enacted in West Bengal after Independence. The evaluation is done with regard to the imposition of ceilings on agricultural holdings, and the distribution of surplus land, and the introduction of tenancy refot-ms, such as regulation of rent, conferring security of tenure and so on. We shall also make certain observations on the changes that have been brought about in the agrarian structure in West Bengal because of the implementation of these reforms along with certain other measures.
Agrarian Structure at Independence
On the eve of Independence the agrarian structure in West Bengal was an extrfemely complex one with the ^amindars at the apex and a rack-rented peasantry at the bottom with many layers of in icrAediaries. The ^amindar who stood at the lipex was often an absentee and sc... among the residents the jotedars were at the top, held large blocks'-of land with full occupancy rights, rarely undertook any manual labour Wd had their fields leased out or cultivated by agricultural workers. It was this class which also took to money lend ing and trading in agricultural commodities to a varying degree ... for about oane hundred years prior to the formal abolition of the ^amindari system in Bengal, this class wai