Another important impact of the British rule is the growth of a new land system in India. In the early period of the East India Company rule, the Company directors were keen on securing the largest possible revenue. This policy was marked by excessive exactions from peasants, not realizing that the British were killing the goose that laid the golden egg in the process. But land revenue was a principal source of finance for Company administration in India. It satisfied the Company directors in England with larger returns every year from their conquest of India.
To bring about stability in agriculture, the British introduced land settlement in 1793. In Bengal and neighboring areas, ‘permanent settlement’ was introduced. The settlement raised the status of revenue collectors to that of private landlords. It fixed land revenue in perpetuity. This was called the Zamindari system, and the zamindar was required to deposit an enhanced land revenue to the state. Later the British extended the settlement to other states and created zamindars there too. Still, they changed over to ‘temporary settlement’ under which land revenue could be reassessed after a period ranging between 25-40 years in different states.
Another and totally different land system was evolved for large parts of Bombay and Madras and subsequently extended to north-eastern and north-western India. According to this system, called the ryotwari settlement, each peasant holding a plot of land was recognized as the landlord and made directly responsible to the state for the annual payment of land revenue.
In both cases, the land rents fixed were excessive, and both the system was instrumental in the destruction of the organic village community based on custom and tradition. Daniel and Alice Thorner write: “Whereas the zamindari system made the landlords masters of the village communities, the ryotwari system cut through the heart of the village communities by making separate arrangements between each peasant cultivator and the state.” Through the introduction of the zamindari system, the British created a class of people whose interests were directly tied to British rule in India. But the system helped to create a class of absentee landlords who were more interested in squeezing higher land rents than in real agricultural progress. Excessive pressure of population resulting in high demand for land helped the zamindars to charge exorbitant rent and numerous other exactions from the tenant-cultivators. The result of the whole change in the land system led to the emergence of subsistence agriculture.
Even the ryotwari-system lost its original form, and the rigorous, prompt, and inelastic demands of high revenue forced peasant-cultivators to sell land to absentee landlords or moneylenders. Lord Cornwallis introduced the British land system introduced by Lord Cornwallis thus helped the concentration of economic power in the hands of absentee landlords and moneylenders in rural India. It depressed agriculture and the peasantry.
The new land system and commercialization of Indian agriculture produced very adverse economic consequences on the Indian economy. These influences retarded, halted the industrialization of the Indian economy, created 'built-in depressors' in agriculture, and were responsible for the occurrence of famines in India.
Nicé
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