PARTICIPATORY ORIGINS: THE PADDY LANDS REGISTER

by Chandra Arulpragasam

The first step in the implementation of the tenancy reforms under the Paddy Lands Act of 1958 was to identify the tenant cultivators to be protected. The second was to establish Cultivation Committees which were to be elected by the landlords and the actual cultivators. Both of these required a record of the names of the owners and cultivators of every piece of paddy land in the country. Since no such records existed at that time, their creation was the first task of implementation.

Such records existed in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, having been created by the British to collect the land tax, their major source of revenue. In the absence of such a land tax in Ceylon, the British never bothered to create such land records here. In the new land reform context, however, the landlords often successfully passed off their tenants as daily paid workers with no rights under the law, while the tenants themselves were cowed into submission by threats of eviction and violence. The reforms based on these deceptive records often had the opposite effect of that intended by the land reforms, confirming the landlord as the actual cultivator while the tenant stood helplessly by, conniving in his own dispossession.

We thus faced two different problems in setting up land records for the implementation of the Paddy Lands Act. The first was the physical problem of identifying and surveying every piece of paddy land in the country and recording its owner, its actual cultivator, which would have taken many years to complete. Secondly, under the shadow of land reform, special efforts would be needed to identify the tenant cultivators, since they may have been evicted, or forced to deny that they were the actual sitting tenants – a more sensitive and difficult task. Both these tasks had to be completed within six months before the law came into effect in six districts.

So we decided to improvise a new and lean system of land records, which would record only the information essential for the Act’s implementation. We abandoned any idea of conducting physical surveys to record the extent of each holding, the quality of the land, etc. All we actually needed was an identification of the owner (his title could be verified later), the rough extent of land and its actual tenant or cultivator.

Knowing that collecting this information through the village or irrigation headmen may yield false information dictated by powerful landlords, we decided to do this through participatory means, involving all the parties concerned. It is important to note how uncommon it was at that time in our ex-colonial countries to draw on the power of the people, especially the poorer beneficiaries, to implement legislation. The procedure that we devised for this purpose, probably the first of its kind, is briefly described below.

A “secretary” was chosen from among the high-school educated youth to collect the needed information for each village. He would go to every field and farmer in the yaya, asking the extent of land, the name of the owner, tenant, etc. He would then prepare a rough map and record all paddy holdings in the village, showing ownership, tenancy, etc., which would be publicly displayed. A meeting of all persons with cultivation interests would then be convened, with a view to verifying the information in this preliminary map and list. After correction and approval by the village meeting, it would become the official register of all the paddy lands and cultivation interests in the village.

The procedure at the village meeting is interesting from a sociological point of view. The tactic used was to counterbalance the power of individual landlords by the countervailing voice of village knowledge. In respect of each paddy lot, the name of the owner and of the cultivator is read out, and the village voices its assent, dissent or correction. Even in cases where a landlord has intimidated his tenant to say that he is not a tenant, the village meeting is asked the question first, before the landlord or tenant is asked. Because the people know the facts, they are usually unanimous in their reply.

It is only after the village has spoken that the landlord is asked whether this is true, and only thereafter is the tenant asked the same question. When all farmers in the village have confirmed that a particular person is the tenant-cultivator of a particular piece of land, the landlord can hardly deny that fact. If the landlord still insists that he has no tenant on the land, the dispute is referred to the Board of Review; hence no injustice is done to the landlord. Despite these careful procedures, it is quite possible that the local landlord influence was so great in particular villages that even the village voice could have been silenced. We will never know, unless actual research is carried out – which was never done.

Two innovatory aspects in this method need to be noted. This was the first time that a participatory, non-bureaucratic method was used for the creation of land records in the developing world. Second, given the power of the landlords, a conscious effort was made to harness the social dynamics of village knowledge as a countervailing force against landlord power, in order to arrive at a village-approved record of all paddy lands. Using the above procedures, we were able, within a period of six months, to prepare a register of landlords, owners, tenants and agricultural laborers for implementation in the six districts to which the Act was initially applied.

Hence, despite Ceylon starting at a disadvantage in regard to land records, we were able to establish a more sensitive and accurate system of tenancy records than was achieved anywhere in the region. This record of all paddy lands came to be known later as the “Paddy Lands Register”, which has subsequently been used as the information-base for the country’s many agricultural development programmes, such as cooperative credit, the guaranteed price scheme for paddy, the fertilizer subsidy and crop insurance schemes.

(The writer worked as an Assistant Secretary to the Ministry of Food and Agriculture when the Paddy Lands Act was enacted)