the landowners. The other was to improve the efficiency of land use, based on the assumption that tenancy was inefficient. Landowners rarely had any incentive to invest in improving the land, and were interested only in deriving an income from their land. Tenants, who had no ownership rights and were liable to pay high rents, had neither the incentive nor surplus money to invest in land.
Tenancy reform legislation was aimed at achieving three ends: (i) to regulate the rent; (ii) to secure the rights of the tenant; (iii) to confer ownership rights on the tenants by expropriating the land of the land owners. Legislation was passed in the states regulating the rent at one-fourth to one- third of the produce. But this could never be implemented successfully. The agricultural sector had a surplus of labour whereas land was a resource in short supply.
Price controls did not work in a situation when the demand exceeded the supply. All that happened was that rent rates were pushed under the table without any official record. Laws to secure the rights of the tenant and to make tenancy heritable were equally unsuccessful. Tenancy agreements were made orally, and were unrecorded.
The tenant thus always had to live with the uncertainty that their land could be resumed by the landlord any time. Envisioning a New Socio-Economic Order across the country. This is generally referred to as the Green Revolution. This also created an enormous demand for chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and these industries grew as well.
Finally, within twenty years, India achieved self-sufficiency in food production. Total rice production increased from million tonnes in – to million tonnes in – . The increase in wheat production was even more impressive, from million tonnes to million tonnes during the same period. Productivity also increased.
A large reserve stock of food grain was built up by the government through buying the surplus food grain from the farmers and storing this in warehouses of the Food Corporation of India (FCI).