Land Policy Reform for Agricultural Transformation in India

Country: India

Location within country: PAN India

Name of Client: The World Bank

Description of Project: The World Bank wanted to better understand the land policy issues holding back agricultural transformation in India and to identify promising policy and institutional reforms and interventions to overcome these issues, with a focus on ensuring that tenant farmers can access public benefits targeting farmers in the short term and on building a foundation for formal land lease markets.

As part of the project, CLG had undertaken the following assignments.

• Assess the status and impact of recently adopted legal reforms to secure the rights of tenant farmers and landowners to agricultural land.

• Analyze the explicit or implicit reliance of agriculture and rural development schemes on land records to identify eligible farmer beneficiaries and any resulting exclusion of tenants, including women farmers, from the intended benefits.

• Identify potentially promising interventions to further secure land tenure rights and increase access to agricultural land, markets, entitlements, and services, especially for tenant farmers, including women.

• Summarize the present state-level legal and institutional frameworks governing agricultural land, with a focus on land tenancy and land records, for two focal states (Odisha and Maharashtra);

• Analyze the impact of land tenure on two World Bank-financed agriculture and rural development projects in the focal states, identify opportunities for strengthening tenure and/or increasing tenants’ access to agriculture benefits/schemes to improve the project’s ability to achieve its development outcomes, and build consensus among key decision-makers on the identified reforms and/or interventions.

• The engagement led to development of a National Background Paper, three State Background Papers, two Project Assessment Reports and seven case studies