What Charan Singh did for farmers' welfare

• The Prime Minister of India recently announced that the Former Prime Minister Chaudhary Charan Singh (1902-87) will be conferred the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian award.

Chaudhary Charan Singh

• He was Union home minister in the Morarji Desai-headed Janata Party government that appointed the Backward Classes Commission under B.P. Mandal in January 1979.
• Its report submitted in December 1980 led to the announcement of 27% reservations for OBC (other backward classes) communities
  • In addition to the existing 22.5% for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC/ST), in August 1990.

Town versus Village

• Singh was struck by a 1961 survey that showed only 11.5% of Indian Administrative Service officers with agricultural family backgrounds
  • 45.8% having fathers who were government servants.
• He, therefore, not only proposed 60% reservations for farmers’ children
  • But also ineligibility for government jobs to those whose parents had already benefitted from public employment.

Criticism and present-day relevance

• The 60% quota – Singh had proposed it first at 50% before the executive committee of the Uttar Pradesh Congress Legislature Party in April 1939
• Landless labourers, constituting 28.1% of the total agricultural workforce in the 1951 Census, were excluded.

Game-changing laws

• He pushed through three major legislations that transformed the agricultural economy of UP.
• The first was the UP Zamindari Abolition and Land Reforms Act, 1950 (ZALR).
• It did away with zamindars who paid taxes to the government, from lands that they themselves owned and also from those cultivated by others, including as tenant farmers.
• ZALR granted all verified tenant-cultivators permanent and heritable interest in their holdings.
• ZALR basically replaced the old zamindari agrarian system with a new rural social order based on peasant-proprietors owning and cultivating family-sized farms.
• Its beneficiaries were the erstwhile hereditary tenant-cultivators, mainly from the Muslim, Yadav, Gujjar, Kurmi and other OBC castes.
• The second was the UP Consolidation of Holdings Act, 1953.
• The new law enabled every landowner to have his scattered plots consolidated by swapping parcels of equivalent quality with other farmers in the same village.
• The idea was to provide every owner-cultivator with a single tract of land making it a more productive holding.
• The last law was the UP Imposition of Ceiling on Land Holdings Act, 1960.
• It established a cap of 40 acres of “fair quality land” per family of five members.
• Consolidated holdings of a certain minimum size were necessary to also allow use of tractors and other productivity-enhancing farm machinery.