The government's recently announced set of agricultural marketing reforms as part of the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan is largely welcome.
However, a critical big-ticket land sector reform, which is the legalisation on land leasing, is still pending.
What is the present scenario?
At present, leasing of agricultural land is either banned or severely restricted in most states.
Only some states allow selected individuals to let out their lands.
These include disabled people, widows or armed forces personnel.
The landholders do not lease them out for fear of losing the ownership rights.
As a result, many tiny land parcels and land holdings of migrant farmers remain unutilised.
But cumulatively, they amount for a sizable part of the cultivable land.
Besides, tenant farmers and share-croppers are denied the compensation for crop damages.
They also find it hard to access cheap bank loans and other government subsidies and doles.
E.g. the direct income support through annual cash transfer of Rs 6,000 per hectare
What does this call for?
The small farmers are now forced to either rent out their fields to quit farming or hire more land to make their holdings viable.
A valid land lease market is, in fact, believed to have become an economic necessity for the small farmers.
Legal validation of land leasing is imperative to undo the gross injustice done to farmers.
Tenurial security, on the other hand, will incentivise tenant cultivators to invest in land improvement and crop yield-enhancing measures to raise their income.
What are the proposals in place?
Legalisation of land leasing has long been a part of the agricultural reforms agenda laid down by the NITI Aayog.
This has subsequently been endorsed by the high-level committee on doubling farmers’ income too.
The committee (headed by an agriculture ministry official Ashok Dalwai) mentioned it in its report submitted in 2019.
The NITI Aayog also appointed a committee headed by the former chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices, T Haque.
This has already drafted a model land leasing Bill to serve as a guide for the states to amend their land laws.
Several states are said to be favourably inclined to reform their land-related statutes.
But, concrete action has not been forthcoming in this field by them.
What is the way forward?
The land acquisition law faced stiff resistance from farmers who did not want to be uprooted from their ancestral lands.
But unlike this, the land lease statute is non-controversial as it does not affect land ownership.
All that the Centre needs to do now is nudge the states to make the necessary provisions in their laws for leasing of land.
The reform needs the cooperation of the state governments, which the Centre will have to seek through persuasion.
If brought into place, a land lease law can potentially help the rural poor move out of poverty.
