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Need for Land Leasing Legislation

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June 13, 2020

What is the issue?

  • The government's recently announced set of agricultural marketing reforms as part of the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan is largely welcome.
  • However, a critical big-ticket land sector reform, which is the legalisation on land leasing, is still pending.

What is the present scenario?

  • At present, leasing of agricultural land is either banned or severely restricted in most states.
  • Only some states allow selected individuals to let out their lands.
  • These include disabled people, widows or armed forces personnel.
  • The landholders do not lease them out for fear of losing the ownership rights.
  • As a result, many tiny land parcels and land holdings of migrant farmers remain unutilised.
  • But cumulatively, they amount for a sizable part of the cultivable land.
  • Besides, tenant farmers and share-croppers are denied the compensation for crop damages.
  • They also find it hard to access cheap bank loans and other government subsidies and doles.
  • E.g. the direct income support through annual cash transfer of Rs 6,000 per hectare

What does this call for?

  • The small farmers are now forced to either rent out their fields to quit farming or hire more land to make their holdings viable.
  • A valid land lease market is, in fact, believed to have become an economic necessity for the small farmers.
  • Legal validation of land leasing is imperative to undo the gross injustice done to farmers.
  • Tenurial security, on the other hand, will incentivise tenant cultivators to invest in land improvement and crop yield-enhancing measures to raise their income.

What are the proposals in place?

  • Legalisation of land leasing has long been a part of the agricultural reforms agenda laid down by the NITI Aayog.
  • This has subsequently been endorsed by the high-level committee on doubling farmers’ income too.
  • The committee (headed by an agriculture ministry official Ashok Dalwai) mentioned it in its report submitted in 2019.
  • The NITI Aayog also appointed a committee headed by the former chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices, T Haque.
  • This has already drafted a model land leasing Bill to serve as a guide for the states to amend their land laws.
  • Several states are said to be favourably inclined to reform their land-related statutes.
  • But, concrete action has not been forthcoming in this field by them.

What is the way forward?

  • The land acquisition law faced stiff resistance from farmers who did not want to be uprooted from their ancestral lands.
  • But unlike this, the land lease statute is non-controversial as it does not affect land ownership.
  • All that the Centre needs to do now is nudge the states to make the necessary provisions in their laws for leasing of land.
  • The reform needs the cooperation of the state governments, which the Centre will have to seek through persuasion.
  • If brought into place, a land lease law can potentially help the rural poor move out of poverty.

 

Source: Business Standard

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