The state government will bring in a new legislation in the monsoon session of the state assembly later this month to protect the interests of sharecroppers. Final touches to the bill have been given by an inter-ministerial committee presided over by revenue minister Bijayshree Routray.
The bill, among other things, envisages a formal agreement to be signed between the landowner and the sharecropper on the basis of which sharecroppers can avail bank loans and compensations in case a natural calamity occurs. The new law will have provisions to provide compensation in the event of crop loss, input subsidy, insurance cover, and other sundry benefits to sharecroppers. These sops are not available to sharecroppers under the existing system.
The bill named Odisha Land Leasing Bill was in the works for some time. The state government was seized of this issue since 2013. It had sent a delegation to Andhra Pradesh to study the extant model in the neighbouring state and fashion a law accordingly for sharecroppers here. Most government programmes, be they incentives disbursement or execution of insurance programmes, could not be successfully implemented here as there was nothing in black and white between landowners and sharecroppers.
The intention of the government to bring in such a bill cannot be faulted. This is a good initiative that will smooth relationship between sharecroppers and landowners. It can also foreclose disputes and litigation between the two parties that have hitherto come in the way of channelising government incentives to stakeholders.
The sharecropper will now find it easy and much safer to invest more in farming which he could not do till now. This was because there was no guarantee that he would ever get compensation in case of a natural calamity. The farmer would now feel encouraged to invest more in terms of fertilisers, pesticides and labour as he knows that his investments would not go down the gutter owing to vagaries of weather.
Having said that, it must be added that the government has made the process cumbersome. A provision of the bill states that the bilateral agreement has to be signed in the presence of a revenue inspector and that copies of the agreement will be kept with the local RI and the tehsildar. The need to secure signature of a revenue inspector in the agreement will not serve much purpose and will be time-consuming.
This will call for unnecessary paperwork and engender corruption in the system. This may give a long rope to revenue inspectors who will try to milk the system and exploit gullible landowners and sharecroppers. And farmers will ultimately suffer. The bill in its current form may not find takers in villages. People will not be interested to use this option.
The bill may create apprehensions in the minds of landowners who may not be forthcoming to lease their land to a sharecropper. As it is there is a marked drop in the percentage of cultivable land in rural areas as landowners are not seemingly enthusiastic to go for sharecropping. In their urge to move in the socio-economic ladder, people migrate to urban pockets. Gradually, the percentage of urban population in the state is going up.
Unavailability of labour and the sharp rise in inputs cost has led to landowners shunning agriculture. There is nothing in the bill to allay the apprehensions of landowners who would distaste doing any type of paperwork with sharecroppers. For them this may be a double-whammy. First, they will now be deprived of the compensations for natural calamities that otherwise would have come to them. Second, they will have psychological inhibitions to sign away their land. This may reduce the cultivable area and eventually hit farm production in the state. This way the bill may prove counterproductive.
