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In News
- Recently, some of the economists have suggested the conversion of all agricultural subsidies (Inputs or Output) into direct income support to farmers.
- The IMF too recently lauded India’s Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) Scheme as a “logistical marvel” that has reached hundreds of millions of people and specifically benefited women, the elderly and farmers.
What is Direct Benefits Transfer (DBT)?
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Who are Tenant farmers? / Data on tenant Farmers
- Who is a tenant farmer?
- He is a farmer or farm worker who resides on land owned by a landlord.
- It is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management, while tenant farmers contribute their labour along with at times varying amounts of capital and management.
- Depending on the contract, tenants can make payments to the owner either of a fixed portion of the product, in cash or in a combination.
- Farm tenancy agreements are largely oral, unwritten contracts and seldom recorded leases.
- Trend: There is a steady increase in tenant farmers.
- NSO survey: According to the National Statistical Office’s (NSO) ‘Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households’ survey for 2018-19, 17.3 percent out of the total estimated 101.98 million operational holdings in rural India were on leased lands.
- The share of such leased-in lands in the total area used for agricultural production was 13 per cent.
- The NSO’s previous surveys for 2012-13 and 2002-03 revealed the shares of leased-in holdings at only 13.7 per cent (11.3 percent of area) and 9.9 per cent (6.5 per cent), respectively.
- State-wise tenancy data
- Highest tenant farmers are in Andhra Pradesh (42.4 per cent) and Odisha (39 per cent).
- Haryana and Punjab: the share of leased-in area is higher than the percentage of tenant holdings.
- It means that the tenant farmers in these 2 states operate relatively large holdings, even though they don’t own these lands.
Related Schemes
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Limitations of DBT Schemes and Tenancy
- Limited reach: Schemes such as PM-Kisan, Rythu Bandhu and YSR Rythu Bharosa do not reach tenant farmers (those who undertake cultivation on leased land).
- Left-out beneficiaries: The exclusion of tenant farmers from income support and also zero/low-interest loans, crop insurance, disaster compensation and other agri-related schemes is significant because of the rising trend of owners no longer directly cultivating their lands.
- Crop cultivator rights cards: The CCRC requires the landowner’s signature and cannot be issued without his consent. Most owners are hesitant to sign any document confirming they have given their lands on lease.
- They fear that any written agreement makes them vulnerable to lawsuits by tenants claiming rights over the land.
Significance of DBT and Tenancy
- Transparency: Direct benefit transfers (DBT) on a per-acre or per-farmer basis is seen as transparent and simple to administer.
- DBT is crop-neutral: only rice, wheat and sugarcane farmers effectively get minimum support prices now and does not cause distortions in input/output markets.
- Eliminate delays in transfers: DBT will avoid time delays in transferring of benefits to the beneficiaries.
- No middlemen: Middlemen will be eliminated to reduce the leakage of funds.
- Biometric identification: Fake and duplicate beneficiaries will be eliminated through biometric identification (Aadhaar). Since intermediaries are removed, this will help the government reduce the structural cost in the end.
Way forward
- Agriculture in India is increasingly seeing both tenancy:
- Landless/marginal farmers leasing land to cultivate.
- Reverse tenancy where small landowners leasing out to better-off farmers keen to reap economies of scale.
- Leasing can help both tenant and reverse-tenant farmers operate consolidated holdings, while allowing owners to take up non-agricultural employment without risking loss of their lands.
- DBT by leveraging the JAM (Jan Dhan, Aadhaar and Mobiles) trinity and the technological prowess offers to drastically improve the benefit delivery system in the country.
- States have to come forward to adopt the Model (Agricultural) Land Leasing Act proposed by NITI Aayog in 2016.
- This Act would allow for the profitable use of fallow land and provide tenant farmers with access to credit and insurance services.
- The government should try to subsume all existing input and output subsidies under a single DBT Scheme and should find an answer to the tenant problem.
Source: IE
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