The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : 55 per cent of rural population landless: survey

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Sep 01, 2004

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

55 per cent of rural population landless: survey

By Our Staff Reporter

HYDERABAD, AUG. 31. A door-to-door survey of 84,430 families in 255 villages of 200 mandals in the State has revealed that 55 per cent of the rural population remains landless and close to 40 per cent are without house sites.

Releasing the findings of the survey to the press here on Tuesday, office-bearers of the Andhra Pradesh Agricultural Workers' Union said that they could identify upwards of 30,000 acres of excess cultivable land in just 255 villages surveyed by them. There was no reason why this land could not be given to the landless and thereby reduce rural unemployment, poverty and at the same time increase agricultural productivity.

Blame on TDP

B. Venkat, general secretary of the union, blamed the previous TDP Government for neglect of land reforms and alleged that joint collectors and MROs did nothing to redistribute land in the past 10 years.

Giving details of the land ownership pattern, Mr. Venkat said that the percentage of landless to the total population was as high as 82 per cent in some villages of East Godavari district. As a pattern, there was a higher proportion of landless to total population in the coastal districts compared to Telangana or Rayalaseema. Ninety four per cent of the scheduled castes remained landless.

Lease rates

Regarding land tenancy, K. Krishnamurthy, vice-president of the union, said that lease rates were so high that many tenants were paying as much as 80 per cent of their produce as rent. Tenants also did not have any legal rights to the land they cultivated and could be evicted at will. Lack of legal rights on land also led to their being denied institutional credit. Even the compensation for crop failure was collected by the landlord who legally owned the land and not by the tenant who actually tilled it, he said.

House sites

The survey also shows that two out of every five villagers in the State do not have a house site. They were living in squalid conditions with many families often sharing a single room and others squeezing into small shanties on the roadside.

Mr. Venkat said that they welcomed the Government's announcement of forming a committee to look into the land issue in the State. He demanded identification of excess land and its immediate distribution to the landless, recording the rights of tenants and implementation of relevant Acts and rules regarding agricultural labourers.

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