Agriculture and Equitable Growth: The Case of Punjab-Haryana by John R Westley

Author:John R Westley [Westley, John R]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367008604
Google: 5bdCxgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 50056968
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

by the Gini coefficient, which increased only slightly from 0.527 in 1970-71 to 0.540 in 1977-78.18 The number of holdings increased by 9.3 percent over the period at a compound rate of 1.5 percent annually (as compared with Haryana's rural population growth rate of 1.95 percent for 1971-81; see Table 22).

The broad impact of tenancy in bringing about more equal access to land is clear from a comparison of the figures for ownership holdings in Haryana in 1977-78 (Table 14) with the figures for operational holdings as of 1976-77 (Table 15). There were about one million operational holdings, as compared with nearly 1.5 million ownership holdings, indicating that at least one-third of the ownership holdings must be leased out to form operational holdings (or are not farmed at all). In the top three size classes (i.e., above 2 hectares), there were 504,000 operational holdings, but 653,000 ownership holdings; so some of the owned land in the semi-medium through large holdings was being operated on the 187,000 small holdings or 308,000 marginal holdings. On the other hand, a large fraction of the approximately 1.25 million marginal holdings are apparently not operated by their owners, many of whom belong to households classified as "self-employed in non-agriculture," "self-employed in non-agricultural labor," or "other" (Table 12).

Data on tenancy are not yet available for 1976-77, but NSS data are available from the 1971-72 survey on landholdings. In terms of "leased-in area" to total cultivated area, Punjab had the highest incidence of tenancy in India (28.1 percent) and Haryana was second with 22.6 percent, as compared to the average for India of 10.6 percent (Table 36, column 98). Moreover, this represented a decline from 39.8 percent reported for the combined Punjab in 1954-55 and 35.4 percent in 1961-62.19 Laxminarayan and Tyagi, however, argued that actual tenancy levels are probably higher in Punjab and Haryana and that the decline indicated by the 1961-62 and 1971-72 data is overstated; in four Haryana villages for which detailed studies were undertaken in the late 1950s or mid-1960s and again in 1971-72, for example, the unweighted average for percentage of cultivated area leased was 47.7 percent in the initial period and 49.4 percent in 1971-72.20 Laxminarayan and Tyagi attributed the underreporting of tenancy to the conversion of formal tenancies to oral leases in order to evade tenancy legislation as noted above.21

The NSS data for 1971-72 on tenancy by size of landholding are shown in Table 16. By comparison with the averages for India as a whole, the proportions of leased-in to operated area for operational holdings in the size classes "small" and above are much higher (on the order of one-third in Punjab-Haryana versus about one-tenth in India as a whole), and the share of the landless in total leased-in area is correspondingly much smaller. In Punjab and Haryana as in the rest of India, however, the bulk of the leased-out area comes from medium and large farms, and the major share of the leased-in area is accounted for by ownership holdings in the "marginal" category (i.

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