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The Centre will circulate the model agriculture land leasing Act 2016, which suggests legalising land leasing to promote farm efficiency. It will also circulate the full report of the expert committee that drafted it to all States to allow them to examine it and enact the legislation if they found merit in it.
“The model law seeks to strike a balance between the interests of the cultivator and the owner by ensuring that the owner doesn’t lose ownership while the cultivator is assured security of tenure.
“Those States that see value in it should go ahead and make it into a statute,” said Alok Kumar, Adviser, NITI Aayog, in a presentation at the national conference of Chief Secretaries and Planning Secretaries of states and Union Territories on Wednesday.
The Centre has come up with the model agriculture land leasing Act as it felt that the land reform laws in most States had not resulted in the desired results of giving ownership rights to tenants and the caps on land holdings prevented economies of scale. “More than 90 per cent of landholdings in the country are below one acre which makes farming economically unviable while 40 per cent land-owners are absentee land-owners which means that the land is cultivated by others,” pointed out Kumar.
The model Act seeks to legalise land leasing in all areas to ensure complete security of land ownership rights for owners and security of tenure for tenants for the agreed lease period. It allows automatic resumption of land after the agreed lease period without requiring any minimum area of land to be left with the tenant even after termination of tenancy, as laws of some States require.
It also permits land owners and tenants to determine the terms and conditions of lease mutually and facilitates all tenants including share-croppers to access insurance and credit against pledging of expected output.
“Agricultural land is a State subject and it is up to States to make laws.
“The model Act is just a template given to States which they could build on to make their own legislations,” Kumar added.
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