The Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS) collaborated with Soham Bhattacharya, currently an Assistant Professor at Dr B R Ambedkar School of Economics University (BASE), Bengaluru,  to study agricultural tenancy in contemporary India. The study was part of his doctoral research.

Tenancy and different forms of rent exploitation have historically been a feature of production relations in India’s agricultural economy and a fetter on the growth of the productive forces in rural India. The abolition – and where that was deemed not possible, the regulation – of tenancy and the policy of land to the tiller were core features of the rhetoric and the letter of land reform. From Independence to the early 2000s, land leased in as a proportion of net sown area was in decline. A major feature of agrarian relations after 2000 is the resurgence of tenancy in many parts of India. During the decade of 2002-03 to 2012-13, there has been a substantial increase in the magnitude of tenancy in rural India.

Leased-in area as a proportion of the total operated area increased from 6 per cent to 10 per cent (NSSO 59th round and 70th round) at the all-India level. After a three-decade-long declining incidence of tenancy, this reversal in the trend is notable. Evidence from village studies suggests that there are large variations in the incidence of tenancy across regions. Variations are also observed in terms of different classes of farmers participating as tenants in different agro-ecological regions.

This study attempts to understand the underlying causes for the resurgence in the incidence of tenancy in parts of rural India. It was focussed on the changing tenancy relations in rural Punjab and rural Andhra Pradesh, two States where this resurgence was particularly marked in the initial two decades of the century. The study is built on the data collected from two of the survey villages that have been studied by FAS as part of its village studies programme, Project on Agrarian Relations in India.

Hakamwala in the Mansa district of Punjab was surveyed in 2011 and a follow-up household census of the village was undertaken by FAS during the month of February, 2020. In Andhra Pradesh, the study focuses on the tenurial relations in the village Ananthavaram, in the Guntur district. The village was first surveyed by FAS in 2005. A quick survey of 30 tenant households was conducted by Soham in collaboration with FAS in August, 2021.