Impact
The launch of Operation Barga and the legal amendments introduced changed the landlord-bargadar relationship in two fundamental ways. First, through anti-eviction measures, the landlords were largely prevented from forcibly throwing the bargadars off the land. In fact, the bargadar rights were made hereditary and thus perpetual. Second, the state guaranteed that the bargadars would receive a fair share of the crop (75 per cent if the bargadar provided the non-labour inputs and 50 per cent if the landlord provides those inputs). This prevented exploitation of the sharecroppers by the landowners.
The 1979 amendment was considered as a radical departure in clinching the issue of Bargadari settlement on a judicial basis. Previously it was almost impossible for a tenant to prove his tenancy rights legally owing to the judicial and administrative red-tapism. But in the new amendments, the responsibility of disproving a claim to bagadari rights was squarely put on the landowners. Self-Cultivation was defined as cultivation on the basis of physical participation by members of the landowner's family and resumption of land under self-cultivation were made under many stringent conditions.
While land reform have generally made little headway in most of India, West Bengal has been an exception. In all, approximately half of rural households in West Bengal have received land reform benefits. In the 20-year period after setting land reforms in place, agricultural growth in West Bengal skyrocketed. More important, rural poverty declined sharply and both food intake and wages in the countryside increased significantly. Operation Barga formed a major part of this success. Progress has occurred in three areas:
1. Regulating sharecropping relationships (Operation Barga)
2. Redistributing ceiling-surplus lands in ownership (Land-ceiling Act)
3. Distributing homestead plots
An empirical analysis of the impact of Operation Barga on agricultural production, productivity, employment, income including its distribution and on the qualitative improvement in the utilization of barga land was conducted during the period 1986-88 in the three districts of Birbhum, Burdwan and Jalpaiguri in West Bengal.
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