THE Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) was carried out between June 30, 2011 and December 31, 2011 by the ministry of rural development, government of India. The three stated objectives of this Census were to enable state governments to prepare below poverty line (BPL) lists, to arrive at a caste-wise enumeration of the population, and to ascertain the socio-economic and educational status of the enumerated castes. Provisional results from the information collected from households in rural India – including data on socio-economic variables such as the castes of households, the main sources of household incomes, and land ownership – were released on July 3, 2015. The data on different variables now released by the government have not yet fully been disaggregated by caste and gender.

The SECC results show a very high share of landless households among rural households in West Bengal and Kerala. Since Kerala and West Bengal are justly famous for the redistributive land reform carried out by Left governments, these high figures for landlessness need some investigation.

DEFINITION OF LANDLESSNESS

IN THE SECC

The first question is definitional: How does the SECC define landowning by a rural household? The SECC definition does not consider homestead land owned by households when assessing landownership status of a household. This in effect means that the SECC data fails to capture those landless households who received homestead land as part of the land redistribution programmes in these two states. This would also include beneficiaries who received crop land, including garden land, on which they later built homes, thus converting their plots (by definition) into homestead land. As we show below, this partly explains why, according to the SECC, the share of landless households is high in the states of Kerala and West Bengal.

HOMESTEAD LAND IN

KERALA AND WEST BENGAL

The most important element of public action in Kerala after 1956-57 was the implementation of land reforms across all regions, initiated by the Communist Party of India-led government. The impact of land reforms went beyond changes in land tenure; land reforms also became the “centrepiece of the programme for social and economic progress” for which Kerala is famous.

There is general consensus among scholars that land reform in Kerala was most successful with respect to tenancy abolition and the distribution of homestead lands. The component of land reform that directly benefited landless agricultural workers was the distribution of homestead land. A significant number of landless agricultural workers received ownership rights over the plots of homesteads. Official data show that between 1957 and 1996, about 5,28,000 households in the state were issued homestead ownership certificates.

The provision to distribute homestead land to agricultural workers was added to the land reform legislation by the CPI(M)-led government in 1967 once it had become clear that the extent of ceiling-surplus land available for redistribution would be smaller than expected. Between 1959 (when the Communist ministry was dismissed) and 1967 (when the second Communist-led ministry came to power), landlords supported by the Congress party had transferred substantial tracts of land. The Kerala Land Reforms (Amendment) Act, 1970 gave landless agricultural worker households the option of buying, in panchayats or townships, 10 cents (0.10 acres) of land each. The payment was to be 25 percent of the market value in normal cases and 12.5 percent of the market value if the landowner possessed land above the ceiling. Fifty percent of the amount finally payable was subsidised by the state, with the remaining 50 percent to be paid in 12 annual instalments (which were never paid). Thus, most agricultural worker households in the state received plots of homestead land free of cost.

Homestead cultivation is a characteristic feature of Kerala’s agriculture, distinguishing it from systems of crop cultivation in many other Indian states. While the average size of a homestead plot is smaller, the cropping pattern in a homestead is more diverse than a plot of garden land. Mixed cropping pattern in homesteads allows for intensive forms of cultivation in small landholdings. The major crops grown in homesteads are perennial and annual crops, such as coconut, arecanut, pepper, cashew, banana, and vegetables. Research on homestead cultivation has drawn attention to its commercial and nutritional importance to the household and its ecological significance in promoting biodiversity. Further, crop cultivation in homesteads is very often combined with livestock rearing – cows, buffalos, goats, and poultry.

The share of land under homestead farming in Kerala has grown, and the share of area under garden land has declined, owing to the demand for land to build houses.Over the years, many small holdings have been subdivided into smaller and smaller homesteads.

In West Bengal, about one million (10 lakh) households received homestead land during the period of the Left Front government (1977 to 2011).

The SECC has completely excluded homesteads from consideration.

LANDLESSNESS:

NSS DATA VERSUS SECC DATA

The effect of not counting homesteads in land ownership is illustrated by a comparison of the SECC data on landlessness (that is, the percentage of households with no land) with the data from the National Sample Survey (NSS) Employment and Unemployment Surveys of 2011-12 (EUS). The EUS definition of land ownership differs from that of SECC in only one respect, that is, the former includes homestead land in its calculation of household land holdings. It is clear from Table 1 that once homestead land ownership is included, the ranking of states by percentage of landless people changes substantially. According to NSS data, Kerala and West Bengal are not among the states with the highest percentage of landless households.

Table 1 Households with no land, NSS and Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC)

DEMOGRAPHIC

PRESSURE

Further, demographic pressure on land is higher in rural West Bengal and rural Kerala than most other states (Table 2). The average area per household is relatively low in the states, and the subdivision of family holdings has accelerated the process of fragmentation.

Source: Table 1.1, NSS KI(70/18.1): “Key Indicators of Land and Livestock Holdings in India,” page A3.

UNDER-REPORTING

IN WEST BENGAL

We have clear evidence from primary survey data that the extent of household land holdings in West Bengal villages has been substantially under-reported by respondent households in the SECC.

In India, as is well known, many households that should, by reasonable criteria, be classified as poor are classified under the general category of above poverty line (APL). This is despite their being clearly poor in respect of one or many criteria, for instance, in terms of employment and per capita income, food consumption, housing, or access to education and health facilities.

The division of the population in to APL and BPL is an exclusionary policy measure. Its objective is to create target groups for certain policies, thus excluding large deserving sections from the benefits of those policies. Respondents to government surveys are now reluctant to disclose actual land holdings for fear that full disclosure will push them up to APL status and therefore out of the purview of various government schemes. Thus, many households with small or tiny holdings of land have reported no land at all because of a fear of unjustly being declared to be “above the poverty line.” In West Bengal, the classification of households into APL and BPL categories – and the exclusion of households from the BPL category – has been marked by misclassification and political vindictiveness.

In three villages in West Bengal, we compared unit-level data from the SECC with household data from surveys conducted by the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS) in 2010 and 2015. These three villages are in three different agro-ecological regions of the state. Landlessness as reported in SECC was significantly higher than in the FAS surveys. In fact, the differences between the figures for these villages were as high as 16, 30, and 37 percentage points. (Table 3).

Table 3 Landless households as a proportion of all households, SECC and FAS surveys in percent

In brief, definitional problems with the SECC survey and people’s legitimate anxiety to avoid being excluded from the benefits of target-oriented schemes, and consequent under-reporting of landholdings, has led to misleading conclusions from the SECC data about landlessness in Kerala and West Bengal.