The abolition of intermediaries was the first and largest component of Indian land reform after 1947. Its object was to remove the layer of zamindars, jagirdars, inamdars, malguzars and other rent receivers who stood between the state and the tiller, collecting land revenue on their own account under the Permanent Settlement of 1793 and the various temporary settlements that followed, and to establish a direct relation between the cultivator and the state. Where the reform succeeded, the erstwhile intermediary's superior right was extinguished, and the occupant who had been paying him rent now paid land revenue directly.
The legislation was a state subject, so it proceeded piecemeal from 1950 onward — beginning with Madras, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Bombay, and extending through the 1950s to the princely-state areas where jagirdari and inamdari tenures prevailed. Compensation was paid, and its constitutionality was contested up to the point where the First Amendment (1951) inserted Article 31A and the Ninth Schedule to place these laws beyond ordinary judicial challenge. Alongside it stood the other two legs of reform — tenancy regulation and ceilings on holdings — which fared far worse.
Why this measure succeeded where others failed
Intermediary abolition is generally judged the one substantial achievement of Indian land reform, and the reason is political rather than administrative. The intermediaries were a numerically small class, closely identified with colonial rule and with collaboration against the national movement, and they had no constituency inside the Congress leadership after independence. Tenancy reform and ceilings, by contrast, threatened the substantial owner-cultivators and dominant peasant castes who were the Congress's organisational base in the countryside, and who dominated state legislatures, revenue bureaucracies and later the panchayats.
The distinction is one of class targets. Abolishing zamindari attacked rentiers; enforcing ceilings and protecting tenants attacked the very stratum that had to implement the law. This is the recurring explanation offered by P. C. Joshi and by Francine Frankel: the reform that had no defenders passed and was carried out; the reforms that struck at the new rural elite were legislated and then quietly neutralised.
The loopholes
Even the successful measure leaked at every seam, and the leaks all worked in one direction.
Personal cultivation was the central device. The statutes permitted the intermediary to retain land in his own cultivation, and the definition of personal cultivation was drafted so loosely — often satisfied by supervision, by risk-bearing or by cultivation through hired labour or servants — that large areas were retained as khudkasht or sir land. Resumption clauses allowed the former intermediary to take back land from tenants for this purpose.
Pre-emptive eviction did the rest. Because the intent to legislate was public long before the law took effect, tenants-at-will and sharecroppers were evicted en masse in the interval, so that no record existed of their occupancy when the law came into force. Sharecroppers were especially exposed, since their tenancies were oral, seasonal and unrecorded, and many were reclassified as agricultural labourers in the very records that were meant to protect them.
Benami transfers and partitions among real and fictitious relatives dispersed holdings on paper while leaving control intact. Because land records were often outdated and their maintenance rested with village officials drawn from the same dominant groups, the paper trail rarely contradicted the claim. Homestead, orchard, grove and religious-endowment exemptions absorbed further area, and compensation paid in cash and bonds provided capital that some former intermediaries redeployed into trade, urban property, moneylending or mechanised cultivation.
Who gained and who did not
The beneficiaries were the upper tenantry — occupancy tenants with recorded and often heritable rights, and substantial under-proprietors, who converted their superior tenancies into ownership. In practical terms this meant the dominant peasant castes: Jats, Yadavs and Kurmis in the Hindi belt, Patidars in Gujarat, Marathas in Maharashtra, Kammas and Reddys in coastal Andhra, and Vellalas, Gounders and others in Tamil Nadu. Having acquired secure title, they had both the incentive and, after the mid-1960s, the technology and subsidised inputs to invest, and they became the principal beneficiaries of the green revolution.
Those who gained little or nothing were the sharecroppers, tenants-at-will and landless labourers, overwhelmingly Dalit and Adivasi. They held no recorded right to convert, were the first to be evicted, and remained dependent on wage employment. Ceiling laws generated small quantities of surplus land for redistribution relative to the scale of landlessness, and the land that was distributed was frequently of poor quality or already under litigation. Daniel Thorner, writing in the mid-1950s while the laws were fresh, had already warned that the reforms would leave the actual tillers at the bottom untouched.
Consequences for the rural class structure
The abolition of intermediaries did not equalise rural society; it recomposed the apex of it. The rentier landlord who lived in the town and drew rent from a distance was replaced, in much of India, by a resident owner-cultivator who supervised production, hired labour, dealt with markets and cooperative credit, and sought to command the state rather than to stand apart from it. Andre Beteille's work on agrarian social structure traced how landownership, caste and power, once tightly bound together, began to loosen and to combine in new ways as this stratum consolidated.
The political consequences were considerable. The new dominant peasantry supplied the base for what came to be called the bullock capitalist stratum, for the farmers' movements of the 1970s and 1980s pressing for remunerative prices and input subsidies, and for the rise of intermediate-caste parties. It also sharpened the confrontation between owner-cultivators and agricultural labourers, since the old vertical bond of patronage between landlord and tenant gave way to a more straightforwardly employer–employee relation. In some regions this fed agrarian militancy; in others it produced episodes of caste violence directed at labourers who asserted wage claims. West Bengal's Operation Barga, which recorded the rights of sharecroppers rather than abolishing a superior tenure, is the standard counter-example showing what could be achieved when the political will and the recording effort existed.
For the UPSC answer
State the object precisely — extinguishing the rent-receiving intermediary and creating a direct state–cultivator relation — and give the constitutional context of Article 31A and the Ninth Schedule. Explain the differential success by class target: rentiers had no political base, whereas tenancy reform and ceilings struck at the dominant peasantry who staffed the implementing machinery. Then list the loopholes as a set: personal cultivation and resumption, pre-emptive eviction of unrecorded sharecroppers, and benami transfers. Close with the structural outcome — gains for the upper tenantry and dominant peasant castes, little for Dalit sharecroppers and labourers, and the emergence of a new rural elite that later drove the green revolution and the farmers' movements.
References & further reading
- Thorner, D. (1956). The Agrarian Prospect in India. University Press, Delhi.
- Desai, A. R. (1948). Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Popular Prakashan.
- Joshi, P. C. (1975). Land Reforms in India: Trends and Perspectives. Allied Publishers.
- Béteille, A. (1974). Studies in Agrarian Social Structure. Oxford University Press.
- Appu, P. S. (1996). Land Reforms in India: A Survey of Policy, Legislation and Implementation. Vikas Publishing House.
- Frankel, F. R. (1978). India's Political Economy, 1947–1977: The Gradual Revolution. Princeton University Press.