Indra’s Drishtikona (Viewpoint)

China Vs. India- Indian Farmers Far Better Lot

Posted : March 26, 2006 at 6:18 pm [IST]

Chinese Farmer

‘The economist’ has an article on the fate of the farmers in China. Many in India dos not know the conditions. The problem in India is no less complicated. But in India the ownership of farmlands are more transparent. After the abolition of Zamindari in 1952, the landholders are those who till the land and own them. They can sell them for the treatment of a family member or for marrying the daughter to keep prestige in the society they live in. Some even sell the land for the expenses of the education of the children. Political party and its cadre can hardly take advantage of their positions. However, there may be some unscrupulous cheats. Rather I understand in many places, the land acquisitions even for national projects are the biggest hurdles even after sufficient compensation. Judiciary is very alive to these issues. The article was an eye opener. Should we keep on talking big about the Chinese miracles with millions of farmers in miserable conditions or with no freedom to sell their own property? I get reminded of the plots in Salt Lake, Kolkata that has been given on 999 years lease to the owner. Are the landlords of the house owners of the property? How can you ensure that your own descendents only will use the house for 999 years? And perhaps, the West Bengal’s CPM government wants to emulate the Chinese?

In 1940, Mao Zedong set out his plans for a “new China”. The republic would “take certain necessary steps” to confiscate land from rural landlords. Under the principle of “land to the tiller”, it would then “turn the land over to the private ownership of the peasants.”
The “necessary steps” involved widespread slaughter. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of landowning rural residents and their families were executed or beaten to death by fellow villagers. The peasants got their small parcels of land. But by the late 1950s, private land ownership had been eliminated and peasants had become property-less members of “People’s Communes”. It was an upheaval that, contributed to millions more deaths in a nationwide famine.
In 1976, the People’s Communes were dismantled. Agricultural production soared, as for the first time in 30 years peasants were allocated (but not given full ownership of) plots of land to farm independently. This marked the start of the economic transformation that today holds the world spellbound. But it is the prosperity of urban China that mesmerises foreign businesses. But, the countryside has lagged ever further behind.
Deng kept in place two pillars of the Maoist rural order: collective land ownership and an apartheid system that barred rural residents from moving to the cities. The latter has begun to erode, due to the need for cheap labour to sustain a manufacturing boom. But the former remains firmly in place.
China is trying again to revive Mao’s vision through a new landowning order, that would ease rural strife, fuel growth and help develop the genuine market economy the leadership claims to want. Giving peasants marketable ownership rights, and developing a legal system to protect them, would bring huge economic benefits. If peasants could mortgage their land, they could raise money to boost its productivity. Ownership would give them an incentive to do so. And if peasants could sell their land, they could acquire sufficient capital to start life anew in urban areas. This would boost urban consumption and encourage the migration of unproductive rural labour into the cities. Many tens of millions of underemployed peasants off the land will move into wealth-creating jobs. The exodus would help those left behind to expand their land holdings and use them more efficiently.
Communist Party ideologues are all too aware that a failure to handle rural issues properly can be destabilising. They worry that allowing peasants to sell their land could restore a rural landowning class, and that peasants would sell up in huge numbers and descend upon ill-prepared cities, throwing up shanty towns and pushing up crime.
In China, it is the absence of reform that is proving destabilising, as peasants protest violently against land seizures by local governments keen to exploit the land themselves. Though materially better off than they were in 1949, many peasants say that local bureaucrats have in effect become the landlords, sometimes using mafia-type gangs to push them off their fields.
A few opponents of land reform in the countryside point to the lack of social-security provisions for peasants. Though peasants have limited control over the land they farm, and in most cases it can at least feed them.
Surprisingly, forced appropriations by local governments have already deprived as many as 40m peasants of some or all of their land since the early 1990s, with little or no compensation. Besides, the best way to secure the welfare of the peasants is not to keep them trapped on underworked land but to spend more directly on services for the poor. With strong revenue growth, a low budget deficit and a booming economy, China can afford this. Compensating peasants for appropriated land on the basis of market values, not just minimal agricultural ones, would help too. And introducing a value-based property tax would persuade local governments to worry less about losing the one-off revenues they now enjoy from the sale of land rights.
Land reform will certainly loosen party control in the long run. A decade ago almost all urban housing was owned by the state. Most is now privately owned. This has fostered the growth of a middle class that wants guarantees that its new assets are safe from the party’s whims. Property owners are electing their own landlord committees-independent of the party-to protect their rights.
China’s Communist Party has shown that it will take big risks if economic development demands them. The political leadership is caught between wanting to retain control and wanting to avoid another upheaval. The leadership is bust at the moment to complete the unfinished business of rural reform.

After writing many times on China vs. India, I find that we hardly know the details of the misery of the mass in rural China. It would have been much better for the Chinese intellectuals to do something serious about it. For them, perhaps India can be better model to start with. Then they can improve on that.

India is not only working for its own citizens, it is also giving employment for citizens of the neighbouring countries in millions and helping in bringing in prosperity in their family.

- Indra

Category: Rural development |