successful, conferment of ownership rights to tenants had mixed results. (c) Land Ceiling Land ceiling refers to the maximum amount of land that could be legally owned by individuals. Laws were passed after the 1950s to enforce it. In Tamilnadu it was implemented first in .
Until , there was a ceiling on the extent of land that a ‘landholder’ could own. After , the unit was changed to a ‘family’. This meant that the landowners could claim that each member of the family owned a part of the land which would be much less than the prescribed limit under the ceiling. Deciding the extent of land under land ceiling was a complex exercise, since land was not of uniform quality.
Distinctions had to be made between irrigated and unirrigated dry land, and single crop and double crop producing land. At the same time, exemptions from the Act were granted to certain categories of land such as orchards, horticultural land, grazing land, land belonging to religious and charitable trusts, and sugarcane plantations. These exemptions were also used to evade the land cieling acts and reported cases of manipulation of land records adversely impacted the otherwise laudable initiative. Ultimately, only about lakh hectares of land was taken over as surplus land.
This was distributed to about lakh tenants–an average of a little over hectare per tenant. Clearly, with their political power the dominant castes who were the big landowners managed to dilute and vitiate the entire legislation. It was common for large landowners to lease out the land to tenants. Usually these tenancy arrangements continued for long periods of time.
The rents received by the landowners generally amounted to about % or more of the produce from the land, which was very high. Tenancy was a customary practice and agreements were rarely recorded. Thus, tenants of long-standing were almost never deprived of tenancy rights. However, tenants could also be evicted at short notice, and tenants therefore always lived under some uncertainty.
Tenancy reform was undertaken with two objectives. One was to empower the cultivators by protecting them against