India's persistent dilemma : the political economy of agrarian reform

This study shows that the failure of succes sive Indian governments to effect meaningful agrarian reforms has led to a political economy in rural India that is shaped, as it was prior to Independence, largely by the interests of an elite minority of landholders. This group, Jannuzi argues, has worked both to deny the socio-economic changes promised by India's own founders and to thwart the needs and inter ests of the rural majority who continue to lack secure rights in land. Examining the govern ment's inability to establish a coherent national program for agrarian reform, Jannuzi focuses on the failure of a political process that, on the one hand, has guaranteed India's landholding elites' strong and continuous representation in the shaping of such agrarian reforms as were legislated and partially implemented and, on the other, has given no meaningful voice to the people at the base of what he calls "the hierar chy of interest in land" in rural India.

The author skillfully interweaves three major themes: (1) the remarkable continuity in the thinking of policymakers in both colonial and independent India as they struggled to articulate and promote agrarian policies; (2) the persis tence of economic arguments for agrarian reform that emphasize the idea that large units of cultivation offer inherent productive effi ciency advantages over small holdings; and (3) the role of both British and Indian decision makers in maintaining a conceptual dichotomy between the issue of increasing productivity and the issue of distributive justice.