Our Excellence - Rural Development & Agri Business

Project

Developing initiative to establish a new agenda for land reforms

Core Development Areas

Provide land access and improved land rights to the rural poor, women & other marginalized groups in India.

Introduction

Farming is a way of life for nearly half of the world's people. In many developing countries and some formerly communist societies, rural families comprise a substantial majority of the population. For these families, land represents a fundamental asset: it is a primary source of income, security, and status. But almost half of these rural families-some 230 million households-either lack any access to land or a secure stake in the land they till. As a result, acute poverty, and related problems of hunger, social unrest, and environmental degradation persist.

Poverty imposes an oppressive weight on India, especially in rural areas where almost three of four Indians and close to 80 percent of the Indian poor live. Despite decades of efforts at poverty alleviation, the absolute number of poor has doubled since Independence in 1947. India today has the largest number of poor people on the planet. India also has the greatest concentration of rural households that are totally landless - 60 million households. Landlessness and rural poverty are closely linked.

In fact, a recent World Bank report, India: Achievements and Challenges in Reducing Poverty (A World Bank Country Study 1997), showed that landlessness is by far the greatest predictor of poverty in India-even more so than caste or illiteracy.

Another 250 million rural residents live in households that own less than 0.2 hectares of land. For many of these households, gaining access to more land would be an opportunity to climb out of poverty. However, land policy and the legislative and administrative framework in India present substantial obstacles to gaining greater land access and rights.

Rural women in India feel the weight of poverty the most. Females are more likely than males to die as infants and children. More than six of ten women in India are illiterate-almost double the male rate. And, most significantly, Indian women rarely have legal rights to land, despite the fact that they are often more engaged in agriculture than men.

Rural land problems in India have not gone unnoticed. In the decades following Independence, many Indian states passed land reform laws aimed at broadening access to rural land. But these efforts-except for a few notable successes-were poorly designed and implemented. Measures aimed at taking significant land from larger landowners (with very little compensation) and strictly regulating the landlord-tenant relationship was difficult to administer and aroused strong opposition. They provided little relief to the rural poor and women and, in many cases, led to perverse results that stymied land access and rights for the poor. Until recently, these failures caused Indian policy-makers to conclude that land reform was not an answer to problems plaguing India's countryside.

IIME plans to research and advocate measures for Land reforms.

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