People's Democracy

Anil Biswas

THE land scenario and the class stratification in rural West Bengal has undergone a sea-change in the last two decades. The traditional structure is no more there and therefore the issues relating to land struggle and other areas of peasant movement have also changed. This, however has to be borne in mind that whatever has happened in West Bengal is not the complete, basic or radical land reforms which is impossible within the bourgeoisie-landlord state structure. The slogan of a radical land reform is, in the main, a slogan for campaign in the present context. The slogan for concrete agitation and achievement is the land redistribution within the ceiling limit. This task has been achieved to a great extent in West Bengal though problem areas like identification, huge numbers of court cases etc. remain. Even then, as I have said earlier, more than 24 lakh landless people have been benefited by the distribution of 14 lakh acres vested land among them.

The most important feature is that the agriculture in West Bengal is no more dominated by the big landowners. Because of the continued and strong land reforms movement and the natural division of families with time, the pattern of land owning has changed heavily in favour of small and marginal holdings. As per the latest data, there are 11 lakh and 7 hundred small holdings (i.e., 16.81 per cent of total holdings), 50 lakh and 4 thousand marginal holdings (76.82 per cent of the total), 4 lakh and 42 thousand middle-level holdings (6.75 per cent of the total) and only 1152 holdings or 0.2 per cent which can be called big holdings owning more than 10 acres. Apart from that, almost 15 lakh share-croppers have functional right over 11 lakh acres of land out of the total holdings.

Though the process of land reforms is not yet complete, new laws to identify more lands for vesting are being drafted, land tribunals for quick disbursement of disputes have been set up and with various kinds of pre-capitalist fetters still there, it is natural that the movement for fetching and distribution of land can not create passion and militancy as before. The objective reality has been changed through land reforms itself. The emphasis is now on other aspects of agricultural production and the emerging production relations in the rural society.

I want to deliberate on some aspects of this emerging scenario.

If one looks at the results of land reform and the other aspects of rural development during the Left Front regime, one must admit that its benefits have been distributed across most sections of the society. High agricultural growth and substantial development of irrigation have taken place in districts that were the most under-developed. Of the various classes in rural society, agricultural workers, marginal and small peasants, even upper sections of the peasantry and other non-peasant sections have all benefited from agricultural growth in different ways. Marginal and small cultivators have been engaged in more intensive cultivation. It has been documented that much of the demand for purchase of irrigation water comes from marginal and small cultivators.

However, one can not deny the fact of high degree of fragmentation of landholdings. According to data from the NSSO for 1980-81, the average size of a parcel of land in West Bengal was 0.346 acre, while the corresponding figure for India as a whole was 1.01 acres. There has been possibly more fragmentation during the last decade. The small plot-size creates problems for mechanization of operations. There is a growing trend of a sort of functional consolidation through jointly hiring a tractor and sharing tube wells to overcome these limitations.

The question of land consolidation has been discussed within the peasant movement from time to time. But, the worldwide experience and the concrete realities in our country show that it is highly difficult to consolidate while maintaining the small or marginal ownership. In these heydays of liberalisation, consolidation under corporate firming is being propagated. We have proved earlier that agricultural growth was possible under the small and marginal ownership. Now the challenge before us is to protect those classes, their ownership while moving forward to growth of production. The Left Front government has decided to follow the principle of "small firm management".

The major need of the peasantry in the face of liberalisation and globalisation relate to provision of non-land inputs, institutional credit, infrastructure and support in terms of prices.

The first question is to expand the availability of institutional credit. The low supply of institutional credit in West Bengal has been noted to be a problem by various scholars and official committees. The credit-deposit ratio in the state has been very low and has been declining. The credit-deposit ratio in West Bengal was lower than the all-India average throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Commercial banks have been mobilising savings in rural West Bengal and investing them elsewhere. In 2000, only about 24 per cent of the amount mobilised from rural West Bengal by the scheduled commercial banks was lent out in the state. The decreasing trend of investment in agriculture throughout the country has thrown a big challenge to the state.

The low supply of institutional finance has led to continued domination of informal sources of credit in the countryside. Although the old types of money lending have declined in the post-land reform period, their space has been taken by new types of money-lenders. There has been a large increase in the interlinked credit transactions between peasants and traders.

To meet the challenge, there has been some effort to expand the network of cooperative banks. The state has devised a system of universal membership of cooperatives. As a result, the post-land reform period has seen a change in the management of cooperatives. Small and marginal farmers now have greater representation in cooperatives and roughly two-thirds of the agricultural credit from cooperative banks now goes to marginal and small farmers; in comparison, in India as a whole, only about 30 per cent of the credit goes to marginal and small farmers.

A more recent response has been to promote the organisation of self-help groups. Midnapore district already has about 21,000 self-help groups and their savings are close to Rs 7 crore, increasing by Rs 1 crore every month. Although micro-credit cannot be an alternative to rural banks in satisfying all the requirements of credit, it can be a means of temporary support in meeting the requirements of small amounts of consumption credit. In this era of globalised finance, it gives the poor some control over their savings.

Along with it, the Left Front has now decided to strengthen Agricultural Services Cooperatives for supplying non-land inputs to the peasants and defending them from the onslaught of the increasing prices of fertilisers, pesticides, tractors and other necessary inputs.

The pressure of liberalisation on the agricultural growth rate has already been felt in the state. Consequently there is increasing risk of price-fall that has been already witnessed in the case of rice in this season also. Therefore, the question of crop variation is an important issue. The peasantry has to be mobilised towards this. Public policy needs to address this issue because changes in cropping pattern in favour of non-food grain crops has to be done without threatening the food security of poor households. An important task in this respect is to organise proactive land-use and crop planning. The state government has initiated serious steps in this regard.

Another important issue is adequate state intervention in agricultural marketing. Historically, West Bengal has had inadequate public infrastructure in agricultural marketing. The lack of market facilities has, however, become a cause of distress to the peasantry in the last few years as a result of the opening up of international trade. The policies of the union government have resulted in enormous financial pressure on West Bengal, and the state needs to find creative ways of meeting the demands of the peasantry. A decentralised procurement, storage and public distribution system could be some of the ways. Also, popularising bio-pesticides, bio- fertilisers and integrated pest management can make our agriculture more competitive and ecologically sustainable.

For the share croppers, production relationships have changed in a major way. The amended land reform legislation provides for permanent and heritable right of cultivation to the registered bargadar. Eviction and threats of eviction have become a thing of the past. Notably, this is true not only for registered bargadars but also for those who have not registered. The political environment in post-land reform West Bengal - in the state as a whole and in a majority of the panchayats - and the local-level power relations have changed so significantly in favour of the poor and the working people that eviction of even unregistered bargadars is practically inconceivable.

In recent years, there has been an increasing trend for landowners and sharecroppers to enter into mutual agreements by which ownership rights of the sharecropped land are given to the sharecroppers. In some cases, the sharecroppers are leaving the land for other jobs and in some other the landowners are eager to sell the lands. The Kisan Sabha has entered into negotiations to protect the interests of the sharecroppers.

A large number of agricultural workers have gained land in the post-land reform period, and they now have important land base. Agricultural workers were the major beneficiaries of the land redistribution programme - about 15 lakh households among the beneficiaries were previously landless. It is noteworthy that the proportion of male agricultural labourers in the total work force declined in West Bengal between 1981 and 1991 by 1.75 percentage points. In the same period, the proportion of male agricultural labourers increased by 2.35 percentage points in India as a whole. But, the increasing countrywide crisis will inevitably contribute to the increase of the number of agricultural workers in West Bengal too. Some sections of poor peasants also work in others’ lands seasonally. The questions of wages are paramount for this class.

In the period of high agricultural growth that followed land reform, agricultural workers also benefited from the increased demand for employment in agriculture. Soon after the Left Front came to power, the Kisan Sabha launched a statewide movement to enforce payment of minimum wages in agriculture, and there has been substantial increase in agricultural wages in West Bengal in the 1980s. Data from Agricultural Wages in India (Rawal and Swaminathan, 1998) show that the growth rate of average real daily wages of male agricultural workers between 1979-80 and 1992-93 was the highest in West Bengal among all the Indian states.

Wage increases in the post-land reform period have to be seen in the context of the high growth of agricultural output achieved during this period, as well as the fact that the agricultural work-force in West Bengal is organised and there is organised mass action to demand periodic wage revisions. In most places wage-levels are determined through collective bargaining in which panchayats and mass organisations play a prominent role.

Employment creation was an important outcome of agricultural growth in the post-land reform period. West Bengal had the highest employment elasticity of state domestic product between 1983 and 1993-94 among the fifteen most populous states of India. This has to be judged from the perspective of the jobless growth that is being experienced all over the world.

While substantial growth of wages and employment took place in the 1980s in West Bengal, the 1990s created much more acute problem. Suryakanta Mishra and Vikas Rawal have mentioned in a recent article that agricultural wages as well as the days of employment available to rural labourers tended to stagnate in the 1990s, with a decline in real wages after the mid-90s. Many factors are likely to have contributed to this stagnation and decline of wages. These include the fact that agricultural growth in this decade was low, resulting in increasing pressure on the peasantry against the growth of wages. (Misra, Rawal, Agrarian Relations in Contemporary West Bengal and Tasks for the Left; Agrarian Studies, 2002.) Both, CPI(M) and the Kisan Sabha, have self-critically admitted that there is a lack of enthusiasm in building up the wage struggle at different levels of the organisation. This is one of the major lacunas of the peasant movement in our state.

Other very important issues for this class are the deprivation in terms of lack of mass adult literacy, schooling among children and access to public health services. Addressing these forms of deprivation have become an important developmental agenda for the state. In the last state conference of the CPI(M) in February 2002, the document on "Left Front Government and Our Tasks" has been adopted. One of the major thrust areas of the document is to initiate new steps to ensure those basic services for the poorest of the poor. We have decided to emphasise our class priority in planning and resource spending and the beneficiaries would obviously be the poorer sections of the rural masses.

As we are talking of rural classes, we must mention that the post-land reform period in West Bengal has seen the emergence of new strata of the rural rich. The impact of land reform on the upper sections of landowners has been two pronged. On the one hand, these sections of the society lost land and therefore bore the brunt of the rise of the working class and the peasantry. Implementation of land reform and establishment of democratic institutions of local government undermined, in a major way, the social and political power enjoyed by this class in the countryside.

At the same time, however, these sections continued to be economically powerful. Although their land-base was weakened in absolute terms, a good number of them continue to have the larger holdings in the villages and the economic value of the land they have been left with has gone up substantially. Also, these sections were an important beneficiary of the expansion of productive forces that was unleashed in the post-land reform period. In some sense, political pressures have forced this class to move out of traditional forms of surplus extraction. These pressures weakened a number of landlords and some of them perished, but a good number of them moved into capitalist forms of investment in land and in other areas of village economy.

Such landowners may not have big holdings in terms of size but they cultivate their land more intensively. They are now engaged in a variety of occupations. In the post-land reform period, they have invested in the non-farm and service sectors. A household from this class may have only a medium-sized land holding but members of the family may be engaged in trade, transportation, in salaried jobs too.

Agricultural growth in the post-land reform period was associated with this class of the rural rich taking advantage of a variety of opportunities that opened up. One such important area was agricultural trading. A related area of investment was the establishment of cold storages. These were also the classes that were the first to invest in tubewells and they continue to own a majority of the tubewells. These tubewells are used not just to irrigate their own lands but also to sell irrigation water to others. They also own tractors and power-tillers, which they rent out.

These traders trade in agricultural inputs as well as produce. Rawal, in a study of Kotulpur in Bankura, found that the number of traders in the block increased from about twelve in the mid-1970s to over 150 in the mid-1990s. They emerged as an important source of production credit in rural West Bengal.

The displaced landowners, along with this new rich have become a source of political tension in the rural areas. They strive to disrupt the unity of the rural poor. It was this section that provided the impetus to Trinamul Congress – led terror campaign in parts of Midnapore, Bankura and Hooghly districts in the 1998-2001 period.

In conclusion, it may be said that the changed scenario has posed new challenges before the Left movement and the Left Front government. Three streams of development planning, refinement of programmes and strengthening mass struggles are to be converged.

(Concluded)

(Note : Bold italics and sub headings have been added - Ed)

part I was carried last week