With socialist slogans nagging its conscience, the Government of Maharashtra could not possibly escape the responsibility of embarking on a land reform programme. Whatever the arguments against land reforms – and they are a legion – it must be conceded that the Government of Maharashtra has drafted an elaborate Bill with meticulous care. But that does not prevent critics of the far right and far left from mounting relentless attacks against it. The cry from the far right is that the Bill, much against the Planning Commission’s views on the subject, seeks to impose ceilings on sugarcane plantations attached to factories. They see disaster in this measure and fear that the supply of raw materials to the factories will not be as regular as it has been all the time.
This is an exaggerated fear resulting from the failure to take into account the salient fact that most of the sugarcane grown in Maharahtra is grown by individual farmers. Sugar factories own only a fraction of the acreage under sugarcane cultivation. Perhaps there would be no harm in leaving the acreage owned by factories untouched for the very good reason that it is not advisable for the Government to saddle itself with the additional and totally unnecessary responsibility of running sugarcane plantations.
The critics from the extreme left attack the Bill for a different reason altogether. They seem to be filled with the obsession that land reform can begin only after all the landholders are reduced to a state of utter penury. The trouble is that our leftists are still afflicted with the hangover from the French Revolution for no reason within the bounds of sanity. The ceilings are reasonable. For wet lands they vary from 16 acres (of perennially irrigated three – crop lands) to 48 acres of seasonally irrigated one-crop lands. For lands on which two crops can be raised the ceiling is 24 acres.
For dry lands the ceiling varies from 84 acres to 156 acres. It is based on the assumption that an average family consists of five members. Larger acreages are permissible to larger families at the rate of one-sixth of the ceiling for every additional member in the family, but with the total holding of a single family pegged at twice the ceiling. The basis on which the compensations will be paid also varies according to the quality of the land.
One difficulty the Government appears to be rather worried about arises from the fact that a number of landlords have already partitioned or sold away lands in excess of the ceilings. There is no reason why the State Government should be worried about this as long as the lands disposed of one way or the other are put to good use. It may be that the Government is over-anxious about pleasing all the “tillers” but it must realise that there are far too many “tillers” (they constitute about 70 per cent of the population of Maharashtra) and there is just not enough land on the State to please them all.
11 January, 1961
