FEATURES NEWS THE RISING NEPAL (DAILY)

By Gandhi Raj Kafle

WHAT will be appropriate-ceiling on land or ceiling on property? Let us leave this to the lawmakers to decide. But, for now the land reforms issues outweighs the arguments on property ceiling. So , there are reasons to hope that the land reforms programme will be implemented once again. The present government headed by Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba is making sincere efforts to implement the proposed programme. It is indeed a welcome gesture that the main opposition party has put its weight behind the programme. So, politically the green signal to implement the land reform programme proposed by the present government has already been given.

But, will the government achieve its objectives? Many questions, however, are being raised. The government says that thousands of landless farmers will get land and the target to achieve higher productivity from such redistribution of land will also be materialised. Many development experts however do not concur with this view. They argue that the government as a policy maker has left no stone unturned to chalkout suitable programmes. But, the shortcoming is that the government as an implementing authority has always been flimsy. Its focus, it seems, is on the implementation side.

Can it be so easily assumed that the government is very poor at the implementation level? The development experts recall a series of past experiences. The government had made similar efforts to implement land reform programmes nearly four decades ago. It is indeed very unfortunate that the land reforms programme carried out in 1964 in the form of a campaign did not yield revolutionary results as far as equity of land distribution and productivity enhancement were concerned.

The aim of such programmes is to achieve high productivity by encouraging transfer of land from the land holders who are passive to the real products. So, the success of such government progrmmes depends on the area of land transferred. For long Nepal’s feudal land system created big farmers, who were satisfied in their rights to ownership over the land rather than truly engaging to produce more from it. On the other side there were landless people, who worked for their landlords to earn their livelihood. They were quite indifferent to productivity of land.

The goal of the land reform campaign of 1964 was to put an end to this system thereby raising productivity by slowly facilitating land transfer in favour of these real producers. But, the campaign failed to meet its target. If we compare two land sample surveys done in 1961 and 1981, we find that only 1,61,987 hectares of land is found to be possessed by farmers having less than 0.5 hectares of land in Nepal, the figure or farmers in the same category in 1961 was 1,99,532 hectares. This means improvement to empower very small farmers through redistribution of land by launching the land reform campaign in 1964 showed in the survey with transfer of 37,545 hectares of land, probably from the big farmers. This is perhaps the less impressive impact in favour of small or landless farmers, who were the target group of people in true sense in the land reforms programme of 1964.

The land reform-programmes launched in the past could not yield the expected outcome. According to the sample survey carried in 1981, seventeen years after the launching of the first ever land reform programme of the country, it was found that nearly 9 per cent of farmers holding aboe three hectares of land still control 47.3 per cent of the total cultivated land of Nepal. For many development experts, who are for revolutionary land reforms to change the structure of the Nepalese economy, the survey statistics are baffling.

If big farmers are not real producers, they can’t assure the government to raise productivity from the land, which they have been keeping with them despite land reform programmes of the government. Enhanced productivity is expected from small farmers, but the problem is that they don’t have enough land to do so. Our first land reform programme introduced in 1964 could not achieve the expected results in favour of small farmers because it allowed the people to escape the land ceiling defined in the law for many big farmers of the country.

Hence, it needs to be realised that the nation’s economic plan does not become revolutionary automatically. It is the vision, it is the people mandated leadership and last but not the least it is the competent bureaucracy to back people’s programmes that make such plans really revolutionary. In Nepal even in 1964, when the country implemented the much sought land reform programmes, the word ‘revolutionary’ had been used massively throughout the campaign. But, that campaign could not revolutionaries our farming system for raising productivity. The campaign gave the country a mixed result in favour of farmers.

Nearly four decades have passed since then. The country gained a series of development experience during this period. The political system, administrative structure, national economic perception and regional and global condition for accelerating the process of socio-economic development too have witnessed a sea change. But, what did not change satisfactory is Nepal’s agriculture sector. It apparently failed to keep the economic hopes of the Nepalese people alive. That’s why every government of the country has been concentrating its attention to initiate land reforms to bring about agriculture revolution.

The Deuba governemnt in the recent times, however, is trying to be different. For it the whole focus is on land reforms once again. Furthermore, what the government stating today is that the land reform programme aims at increasing agricultural productivity. As was the case in the previous reform campaign in the country, the government is taking it as a revolutionary programme. Will it be successful? Will Nepal’s Agricultural sector be revolutionarised with glut of grains produced by encouraged farmers of the country? Actually, the government, it seems, is interested to redistribute land among the poor farmers obtaining it from land holders having land behind the premissible limit. But, can the government get enough land from them for this purpose? Preliminary estimates reveal that there will not be enough land for the government as far as redistribution of land is concerned from the new arrangement of land reforms in Nepal. Yet, the government should go ahead in its mission because land reforms target broader benefit for real farmers.

Other Stories