What Charan Singh did for farmers' welfare

Last Updated13/02/2024

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.