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Namita Waikar is a novelist and journalist from Pune, India. Waikar is the managing editor and co-founder of the People's Archive of Rural India (PARI).

For issue #140 of The Internationalist, she highlights systemic injustice and exploitation faced by unregistered tenants—who are denied compensation, trapped in debt, and excluded from government schemes—due to landowners' refusal to acknowledge their tenancy.

Vegi Mahesh, a tenant farmer from Gavadapalam village, in the Anakapalli district of Andhra Pradesh, spoke at a farmers’ conference in Mysuru in southern India in November 2022. He owns 1.5 acres of land, which is not sufficient to feed his family and earn enough to live on from selling produce. So, his family has leased another 4 acres from a landowner, to cultivate it and thus generate the required additional income. The amount of rent for each acre is Rs 10,000, and it needs to be paid irrespective of whether the expected crop growth occurs, or there is loss due to any adversity. Floods caused a major crop loss for this tenant farmer a year ago. The compensation from the government went to the landowner, who refused to share it with Mahesh and his family. They can claim the compensation, provided they officially register themselves as tenant farmers, through an application that needs the landowner’s signature. He refuses to sign any such paper. Which means that, officially, there is no recognition of these tenant farmers, and they lose out on all the relevant government schemes: for example, compensation for crop loss due to natural disasters such as heavy floods. The only option available to them is to take out loans with private money lenders, at high interest rates. This is the cause of indebtedness for many of the marginal and land- less who are tenant farmers, and this state of affairs has remained largely unchanged since India’s colonisation by the British.

Kirankumar Vissa is an activist for tenant farmers, who is associated with the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture or ASHA-Kisan Swaraj Network, and Rythu Swarajya Vedika (RSV), an organisation working to ensure sustainable livelihoods for agricultural communities in the two Telugu-speaking states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. At the Mysuru conference, he spoke about the need to look at the structural inequalities in our society:

"Consider this—while some families have very small pieces of land of up to 2 acres, some others in the same village have 25 acres, 50 acres, and some have no land at all. This kind of structural inequality has been passed down through several generations. Land reforms and Land Ceiling Acts have been implemented only half-heartedly in most states of India. To address the invisibilised tenant farmers, we need to first recognise this very deep injustice."

The Punjabi University students had raised the same issues regarding their localities in north India. In effect, the tenant farmers have no bargaining capacity at all; their working conditions resemble a kind of bondage.

The scale of this problem can be gauged from this table displaying National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data from 2018–19, which shows the land holdings cultivated by tenant farmers across different states:

On average, 17.3 per cent of land holdings in India are cultivated by tenant farmers. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, about 42 per cent are cultivated by tenant farmers, although in some districts, it is almost 80–90 per cent. On average, it is about 50–60 per cent in Andhra Pradesh, and in Telangana, it is 33 per cent, according to an RSV survey of 4000 tenant farmers. In Uttar Pradesh, officially, it is about 18 per cent. However, studies of eight of the state’s districts found that 72 per cent of the holdings are cultivated by tenant farmers. As the landowning families move to cities, for their non-farming jobs and businesses, the number of tenant farmers is increasing day by day. The problem is further exacerbated by Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) schemes [1] such as PM-Kisan, at the national level—or similar schemes in states such as Rythu Bandhu in Telangana, and others in Odisha and West Bengal—through which a fixed amount each year goes to landowning families.

For example, in Telangana, the state government’s Rythu Bandhu scheme is dispensing Rs 150 billion every year, meant as support for buying inputs, out of which about Rs 60 billion goes to non-farming landowners. Because of receiving these benefits, the landowners are even more reluctant to acknowledge that they are leasing land for cultivation to the marginal and landless farmers.

The only way of resolving this critical issue is to insist that when land records are registered, the name of the farmer who is actually cultivating the piece of land is recorded along with the landowner’s. In most states of India, this is the basic principle of the revenue laws, and is supposed to happen for every cropping season, every year. It is an undeniable fact, however, that this is not happening. After much struggle, and demands by tenant farmers and farmers’ organisations, the united Andhra Pradesh (before Telangana was carved out into a separate state in June 2014) brought in the Licensed Cultivators Act, 2011, which was eventually enforced in both the states. Under it, any tenant farmer can fill in a simple form, specifying the farm area that he has leased for cultivation, and the landowner. It is the job of the local revenue official to verify the application with the Gram Sabha. ‘The irony of the situation is that every person in a village knows who is cultivating whose land. However, this common knowledge of the community needs to be recorded officially and it can happen only if there is a political will,’ said Kirankumar Vissa.

Notes:
[1] The Indian government launched the DBT program on 1 January 2013, to directly transfer the benefits to the underprivileged population, who were covered under thirty-four central schemes. The aim was to make payments directly into the Aadhaar (identity card)-linked bank accounts of the end beneficiaries, removing the possibility of diversions, pilferage of funds, and duplicate payments. The DBT program is used to implement various government schemes for families living below the poverty line: cooking gas subsidies, student scholarships, etc. The government also uses DBT to transfer funds to farmers. The problem is, tenant farmers are left out, as only landowning farmers are registered for this benefit.


Excerpted with permission from Farmers Protest!: A Movement For Our Times by Namita Waikar. Published by Yoda Press, 2025.

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