While land reforms have always been high on Indian government’s agenda since independence, their implementation has varied widely across the states. Land reforms were implemented more successfully in the state of West Bengal than most other states, through a special program undertaken in 1978 by the state government. These reforms brought large amount of agricultural land under registered tenancy, which entailed permanent and inheritable tenancy rights to cultivate the land. Chapter 1 uses survey data of nearly 9000 plots from 2000 households in 142 villages in West Bengal, to ascertain that both productivity and long-term investments on land under registered tenancy are significantly lower than the land cultivated under full ownership. The difference ranges from 19 and 20 percentage points for gross and net revenue, respectively. The tenanted plots are also 26 percent less likely to have received labor intensive investment in land improvements during the last 8 years, and 7 percent less likely to have private irrigation investment attached to them. We also find evidence for disparate levels of input usage on the tenancy plots as compared to those which are fully owned by the cultivator. Programs to allow land reform beneficiaries to acquire full ownership could thus have significant benefits. In chapter 2, we use individual level data on inter-generational gains in educational attainment from 95,926 households in 200 West Bengal villages, to explore the impact of land reform on human capital accumulation. Difference-in-difference estimates point toward significant gains of about 0.1 years overall and 0.3 years for males in the immediate post-reform generation. The gains are much bigger for the second generation, ranging from 0.85 to 1.2 years. The results are also positive and significant for subsample of landless and SC/ST households, suggesting that the significant differences in educational attainment between land reform beneficiary households and non-beneficiary households are unlikely to be caused by other educational or anti-poverty programs.
Read
