The tenant question

Campaigning for the Bihar polls has put spotlight on tenant farmers’ rights, even as tenancy legalisation remains contentious. Sanjeeb Mukherjee explains

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As the high-stakes assembly election campaign peaks in Bihar, the issue of tenant farmers and sharecroppers — and their rights — has gained political traction.

One of the key promises made by the Opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-led Mahagathbandhan (MGB) is to extend the benefits of the minimum support price (MSP), cheaper loans through Kisan Credit Cards, and other government schemes to sharecroppers. For this, they propose issuing special identity cards to such farmers.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), or CPI(ML), a crucial ally within the MGB, has also pledged in its manifesto to introduce identity cards for sharecroppers, guarantee their rights, and impose aban on evictions.

A report by the State Level Bankers’ Committee (SLBC) released a few years ago noted that sharecropping or tenant farming remains one of the defining features of Bihar’s agrarian landscape. The report said that the extent of sharecropping in the state rose from 22.67 per cent to 25.1 per cent of the operational holding between 2012-13 and 2018-19. Nationally, the figure increased from 10.88 per cent to 13 percent of total operational landholdings during the same period. However, experts have long argued that official data underestimates the true scale of tenancy, with some suggesting that more than 37 per cent of Bihar’s farmland is cultivated by tenant farmers.

Some reports indicated that the MGB, until a few weeks ago, was in advanced discussions over incorporating the recommendations of the D Bandyopadhyay Commission on sharecroppers. The commission, set up years ago, had proposed an umbrella law to protect tenant farmers and a cap on landholdings. The MGB's manifesto, however, stops short of fully endorsing these recommendations.