Book III, Chapter 7: Land Resolutions of Ripon and Curzon

CHAPTER VII

LAND RESOLUTIONS OF RIPON AND CURZON

The uncertainty of Land Assessments, and the harassment caused by the revaluation of lands in Settlement Operations, were evils which successive Viceroys endeavoured and desired to remedy. Lord Mayo was of opinion that, when the quality of the soil and the quantity of the produce were once ascertained, there should be no further alterations in assessment except on the ground of fluctuations in prices. Lord Northbrook was also in favour of a self-regulating system of assessments, and was not in favour of repeating valuations at each fresh Settlement. The question was finally taken up by Lord Ripon. In his despatch of October 17, 1882, he desired to eliminate from future settlements the elements of uncertainty and inquisitorial inquiry. His object was to give the agriculturist an assurance of permanence and security, whilst not depriving the State of the power of enhancement of the revenue on “defined conditions.” The reader will perceive that this was a compromise between the two opposite principles which had been held for twenty years by Indian administrators.

Men like Canning and Lawrence had held that the Land Revenue should be fixed for ever, leaving to the people of the country all future increase in the profits of agriculture. Other administrators had held that the State should claim an indefinite increase of revenue from the increasing profits from agriculture. Lord Ripon’s masterly scheme met the views of both schools. He left the door open for a continuous increase of the Land Revenue with the increase of prices. At the same time, he offered to the cultivators what was virtually a Permanent Settlement of the Land Revenue as represented in produce.

To Settlement Officers Lord Ripon virtually said: You shall have a legitimate increase in the Land Revenue if there is an increase in the prices of crops. To the cultivators he said: You are secure henceforth from all uncertainty and all harassing inquiries; the Land Tax you pay shall not be an enhanced share of your produce.

Lord Ripon addressed the Governments of Madras and Bombay, offering this scheme for their acceptance. The Government of Madras accepted the proposal that in districts where the Land Revenue had been adequately assessed, i.e. in districts which had been duly surveyed and settled, the element of price alone would be considered in future settlements. The Government of Bombay demurred to the proposal.

After a considerable correspondence, the matter came up before the Secretary of State for India for final decision in 1885. He had disapproved of the scheme of a Permanent Settlement of the Land Revenue for India only two years before. It was hoped that the acceptance of Lord Ripon’s scheme would at least give some security to the people against arbitrary and uncertain enhancements of the Land Revenue. It was hoped that after the bitter experience of a quarter of a century, the Crown Administration would at last give the harassed cultivators of India some pledge, some intelligible rule, to determine demands of the State. It was believed that the difficult problem would accept its final solution in the masterly compromise that Lord Ripon had made.

The action of the Secretary of State for India destroyed all these hopes. He looked to the interests of the Indian Land Revenue, not to the welfare of the Indian cultivators. He would frame no definite rule; he would give no pledge. “Some of the principal administrative difficulties which now exist in India,” he recorded in reply to Sir Alfred Lyall, “arise in a measure from such pledges having been given on former occasions.” He did not perceive that the greatest of all “administrative difficulties” in India was the wretched poverty of the cultivators; and that no progress, no improvement, no accumulation of agricultural wealth was possible without some definite rule or pledge given to the people.

Accepting the principle that it was desirable to simplify procedure and avoid unnecessary harassment to the people, the Secretary of State laid down the following rules:—

(1) The idea of a Permanent Settlement is abandoned.

(2) The State shall claim its share in the unearned increment of the value of land.

(3) Rise in prices is one of the indications and measures of this increment.

(4) Revision Settlements should be made less arbitrary, uncertain, and troublesome to the people in the future.

(5) Modifications should be made in the assessment rules, and enhancement of revenue should be made mainly on increase in the value of land.¹

These elaborate instructions, excellent in their way, fixed no definite or intelligible rule by which the cultivators of India could measure their liabilities, or Settlement Officers could limit their enhancements. Settlements therefore went on as before; enhancements of the Land Revenue were made on grounds which the cultivators did not understand and could not contest. And how little the new rules of 1885 added to the prosperity and the staying power of the cultivators was proved by the famines of 1897 and 1900.

Then the question was once more taken up by some men who had passed the best part of their lives in the task of Indian administration. They had retired from the Indian Service, but still felt a strong desire to help and befriend, as far as they could, their Indian fellow-subjects. They met in consultation in London, when India was still suffering from the famine of 1900, and they submitted a Memorial to the Secretary of State for India offering five suggestions to make the existing rules of land administration definite and clear, and more helpful to the Indian agriculturists.²

The five suggestions made in the Memorial are given below:—

Thirty Years’ Rule.—“That no revision of the Land Tax of any Province, or part thereof, should be made within thirty years of the expiration of any former revision.”

Half-Rental Rule.—“Where the Land Revenue is paid by landlords, the principle adopted in the Saharanpur Rule of 1855, whereby the Revenue demand is limited to one-half of the actual rent or assets of such landlords, should be universally applied.”

Half-Produce Rule.—“Where the Land Revenue is paid directly by the cultivators, as in most parts of Madras and Bombay, the Government demand should be limited to 50 per cent. of the value of the nett produce, after a liberal deduction for cultivation expenses has been made, and should not ordinarily exceed one-fifth of the gross produce even in those parts of the country where, in theory, one-half of the nett is assumed to approximate to one-third of the gross produce.”

Enhancement Rule.— “That when revision is made in any of those parts of India where the Land Revenue is paid by the cultivators direct to the Government, there should be no increase in the assessment except in cases where the land has increased in value, (1) in consequence of improvements in irrigation works carried out at the expense of the Government, or (2) on account of a rise in the value of produce based on the average prices of the thirty years next preceding such revision.”

Local Cess Rule.— “Lastly we recommend that a limit be fixed in each province beyond which it may not be permissible to surcharge the land tax with local cesses. We are of opinion that the Bengal rate of 6 1/4 per cent. is a fair one, and that in no case should the rate exceed 10 per cent.”

Our readers who have followed the story of Indian Land Administration in the preceding chapters will perceive at a glance that the memorialists suggested no new rules and no foreign principles. They accepted the different land systems which had grown up in the different provinces of India. They accepted the principles which had been laid down by preceding administrators. They suggested rules which were in keeping with the principles generally recognised in India. They asked for no large measures, like the extension of the Permanent Settlement, as had been done by Canning and Lawrence. And they did not demand the abolition of the local cesses imposed on land, as has been done in the present work. They desired only to limit such cesses, though the limits which they recommended have been somewhat vaguely worded in their last rule. What was meant by the rule is that when the cesses are assessed in Rents as in Bengal, they should not exceed 6 1/4 per cent. of the rental; and when they are imposed on the Land Revenue as in other Provinces, they should not exceed 10 per cent. of that revenue.

The memorial was forwarded by the Indian Secretary of State to the Government of India, and the Land Question thus again came up for discussion. Lord Curzon approached the subject with a true appreciation of its national importance, and gave it his own personal consideration. It was unfortunate, however, that he did not institute any open inquiry, and he did not ask for the views and opinions of the people or of popular associations. In a matter so vitally touching the welfare of an agricultural nation, some expression of the popular opinion might have assisted the Viceroy in viewing the question from both sides; some deliberation among men familiar with land tenures in the different Provinces might have cleared many misapprehensions. Lord Curzon simply asked for the opinions of the local governments, and the local governments naturally defended the systems which they themselves worked. Their defence was summarised in a Government Resolution,³ which was published as a final reply to the memorial.

The memorialists had not urged an extension of the Permanent Settlement. Many of them did not consider such extension desirable; and they had asked for reforms in which they all agreed, and which involved no change in the existing system. Nevertheless Lord Curzon thought it desirable to travel out of the proposals which the memorialists had made, and to condemn the proposal of a Permanent Settlement which the memorialists had not made.

“At an earlier period,” says the Resolution, “the school of thought that is represented by the present critics of the Government of India, advocated the extension of the Permanent Settlement throughout India.” “They [the Government of India] cannot conscientiously endorse the proposition that in the interests of the cultivator that system of agrarian tenure should be held up as a public model which is not supported by the experience of any civilised country.”⁴

“The school of thought” referred to represents the views of such men as Lord Cornwallis and Sir Thomas Munro, Lord Wellesley and Lord Hastings, Lord Canning and Lord Lawrence, Lord Halifax and Lord Iddesleigh; and the fame of these eminent administrators, who have built up the Indian Empire by their sympathetic regard for the people no less than by their vigour and wisdom, will survive the sneers of modern Imperialism. And when Lord Curzon adds that a Permanent Settlement of the Land Revenue “is not supported by the experience of any civilised country,” he forgets the history of his own country where the great Pitt made the Land Tax perpetual and redeemable in 1798, five years after Cornwallis had fixed the Land Revenue in Bengal.

But the Permanent Settlement of Bengal has a stronger justification than the Perpetual Settlement of England. In England the Settlement benefits the landed classes only, for they are the sole proprietors; in Bengal it benefits the nation—the cultivators more than the landed classes—for the cultivators are primarily the owners of the soil. In England the Settlement is an invidious limit to a tax on one out of many sources of the nation’s income; in Bengal it is a protection to agriculture, which is virtually the only source of national income. In England it has had the effect of making the rich richer, and the poor poorer; in Bengal it has had the effect of helping the poor—the millions of cultivators—more than the rich. In England it has added to the wealth of a limited class; in Bengal it has made the nation more prosperous, and less liable to the effects of those famines which have cost millions of lives in other Provinces of India.

But, as stated before, the question of extending the Permanent Settlement was never raised in the Memorial, and it is necessary to confine ourselves in the present chapter to Lord Curzon’s decision on the five suggestions which were made in the Memorial. We shall take them in the order in which they have been already quoted.

Thirty Years’ Rule.—Settlements are made for thirty years in Northern India, Madras, and Bombay; but the period of Settlements has been cut down to twenty years in the Punjab and the Central Provinces, as we have seen in previous chapters. The memorialists urged that the liberal and considerate rule of Settlements for thirty years should be maintained in all Provinces. Lord Curzon justifies the present difference in practice, but leaves us in hope that it will disappear in time. He says:—

“The reasons for this differentiation are familiar and obvious. Where the land is fully cultivated, rents fair, and agricultural production not liable to violent oscillations, it is sufficient if the demands of Government are readjusted once in thirty years, i.e. once in the lifetime of each generation. Where the opposite conditions prevail, where there are much waste land, low rents, and a fluctuating cultivation; or again where there is a rapid development of resources, owing to the construction of roads, railways, or canals, to an increase of population or to a rise in prices, the postponement of re-settlement for so long a period is both injurious to the people, who are unequal to the strain of a sharp enhancement, and unjust to the general tax-payer who is temporarily deprived of the additional revenue to which he has a legitimate claim. Whether these considerations, justifying a shorter term of settlement than thirty years, apply with sufficient force to the Punjab and the Central Provinces at the present time, and if they do apply at the present time, whether the force of their application will diminish with the passage of time, are weighty questions to which careful attention will be given by the Government of India upon a suitable occasion.”⁵

The reasons alleged for the differentiation are historically wrong. The Central Provinces were less advanced in cultivation, had lower rents, and were more in need of development by railways and roads in 1863–67, when a settlement for thirty years was made, than in 1895, when a settlement for twenty years was made. Northern India and Bombay were less developed and less advanced in cultivation in 1833 and 1837, when they were settled for thirty years, than the Punjab is at the present time. The idea in those days was to permit the people to obtain the benefits of long settlements; to let them enjoy the fruits of all progress during the generation of a lifetime; and to inspire them with a motive for making improvements by leaving them alone for thirty years. A narrower desire to demand more frequent enhancements dictated the policy of 1895; and the policy stands condemned by its result. The people of the Punjab and the Central Provinces desire to see an early fulfilment of the hope held out in the last sentence of the above extract, a return to the more generous policy of Lord William Bentinck, Lord Canning, and Lord Lawrence.

Half-Rental Rule.—The declaration of the Government on this rule is contained in the following extract :—

" While the standard of 50 per cent. has nowhere been laid down as a fixed and immutable prescription, there has been, and there is, a growing tendency through temporarily settled Zemindari Districts to approximate to it, and in special circumstances a very much lower share is taken. It does not appear to the Government of India to be necessary to issue fresh regulations upon a matter in which their general policy is so clear, and where, save in exceptional cases to be justified by local conditions, uniformity of practice is now so common."⁶

The Saharanpur Rule of 1855, and Sir Charles Wood’s despatch of 1864 laid down 50 per cent. of the rental or the economic rent as the limit of the Land Revenue assessments, and these limits were exceeded in the Central Provinces and elsewhere, as we have seen in preceding chapters. The above extract is probably meant as an assurance that there is a growing tendency now to return to these limits. The people of India hope that the Half-rental Rule will not again be set aside in any Province, in any future settlements.

Half-Produce Rule.—The Government resolution has misstated the object of the memorialists in respect of this rule. The memorialists suggested a double limit: (1) that the Land Revenue should not exceed half the nett produce; (2) that it should not exceed one-fifth the gross produce in certain parts of India where it does exceed that proportion. The Government resolution replies:—

“The gross produce standard recommended by the memorialists would, if systematically applied, lead to an increase of assessments all round.”⁷

The memorialists laid down no such standard for systematic application. They only laid down a maximum limit. The Gujrat, what is generally taken as half the nett produce, is in many villages and fields far in excess of one-fifth the gross produce. In Madras it was assumed that one-third of the gross produce would be half the nett produce, and one-third of the gross produce was therefore sometimes demanded as Land Revenue.⁸ It is to correct such misleading calculations, and to prevent over-assessment, that the memorialists, while accepting the Half-nett Produce Rule, proposed an additional limit that the Half-nett Produce should in no case exceed one-fifth the gross produce. And many over-assessed fields and villages in Bombay and in Madras would have obtained relief if the Government had accepted this second limit in addition to the Half-nett Produce Rule prescribed in 1864.

Enhancement Rule.—The object of the memorialists was the same that Lord Ripon had in view, viz. to specify and define the grounds on which the State was entitled to enhance its Land Revenue demand. They accepted Lord Ripon’s rule of increase in prices as a ground of enhancement; and they added to it the improvement made by Government irrigation works as another reasonable ground of enhancement. The memorialists desired that every peasant proprietor in India should know and feel that the State did not enhance the Land Revenue except on specific and equitable grounds; and should have the same security that is now offered to the tenants of private landlords in Bengal. The Government of Lord Curzon has declined to grant him this security on the following grounds:—

“To deny the right of the State to a share in any increase of values except those which could be inferred from the general table of price statistics—in itself a most fallacious and partial test—would be to surrender to a number of individuals an increment which they had not themselves earned, but which had resulted partly from the outlay of Government money on great public works, such as canals and railways, partly from the general enhancement of values produced by expanding resources and a higher standard of civilisation.”⁹

The whole of this argument is a misstatement of the point at issue. The memorialists asked for no surrender of the just rights of the State. They expressly reserved to the State the right of enhancing the Land Revenue on the very grounds mentioned in the Government Resolution. If canals increased the produce, the State was entitled to an increase of revenue. If railways raised the prices, the State could raise its demand. If “expanding resources” and “a higher standard of civilisation” caused a general enhancement of values, the State could enhance the Land Assessment accordingly. But if none of these grounds existed, the State should not arbitrarily increase its demand at each recurring Settlement. This was the argument of the memorialists. The argument has not been met or answered.

To the cultivator of India, all the benefit he derives from “expanding resources” and “a higher standard of civilisation” is represented by the increase of produce or the increase of prices. If canals have increased his produce, if railways and roads have increased prices—he is justly liable to an increase in the State-demand. If there has been no increase in produce or in prices, if his economic condition remains precisely the same as before, why should the Settlement Officer add to his burdens because his richer neighbour can travel by rail, or his money-lender has a civil court nearer at hand? To enhance the Land Tax when the land does not produce more, and the produce does not fetch higher prices, is to tax the cultivator for a benefit he has not derived, and to make him poorer with advancing civilisation.

Local Cesses Rule.—From what has been stated in the preceding chapters, the reader will perceive that special taxes imposed on land, in addition to the Land Tax, are harsh and unfair, and violate the Half-Rental Rule and the Half-Produce Rule, laid down in 1855 and 1864. The memorialists, however, did not suggest their withdrawal, but that they should be placed within fixed limits. The proposed limits were 6¼ per cent. on the Rental or 10 per cent. on the Land Revenue. The present rates in Northern India, in the Punjab,¹⁰ in the Central Provinces, and elsewhere, greatly exceed these limits. The people of India have some hopes of relief from the following remarks recorded in the Government Resolution :—

" There are grounds for suspecting that the distribution is often unfair, and that the landlords shift on to the tenants that share of the burden which is imposed by the law upon themselves. In the present backward condition of so many of the people, it is not possible effectively to redress this injustice. And the question presents itself, whether it is not better, as opportunities occur, to mitigate imposts which are made to press upon the cultivating classes more severely than the law intended. The Government of India would be glad to see their way to offer such relief."¹¹

Two years have nearly expired since this was recorded. Two budgets with large surpluses were framed in March 1901 and March 1902 ; but not one of the special cesses on land, imposed since the Decentralisation Scheme of 1871, has yet been withdrawn.

It is a lamentable truth that the peasant proprietors of Madras and Bombay, paying the Land Tax direct to the State, have, at the present day, less security than the tenants of private landlords in Bengal. The Bengal tenant pays 11 per cent. of his produce to his landlord ; the Gujrat Ryot pays 20 per cent. to the State. The Bengal tenant knows the specific grounds on which his landlord can claim enhancement ; the Madras and Bombay Ryot does not know the grounds on which the State will claim enhancement at the next Settlement. The Bengal tenant reckons beforehand the limits of his landlord’s claims ; the Bombay and Madras Ryot cannot guess what the Settlement Officer’s claims will be. The Bengal tenant can appeal to Courts against excessive demands; the Bombay and Madras Ryot can appeal to no Land Courts and no independent tribunal against unduly severe assessments. Certainty and definiteness in the rental make the Bengal tenant value his tenant-right, and enable him to free himself from the thraldom of the money-lender; uncertainty and indefiniteness in the State demand make the Madras and Bombay Ryot till his land without hope, without heart, without motive to save, and year by year he is sinking deeper in indebtedness. The Marquis of Ripon proposed to bestow on the peasant proprietor something of the security which the Bengal tenant enjoys, but the proposal was negatived by the Secretary of State in 1885. Friends of the voiceless cultivators of India again appealed for such security in the closing days of the century; the appeal was rejected by Lord Curzon in January 1902.

Footnotes