ABSTRACT
The Founding Fathers had specified that agriculture would be a state subject under the constitution. Given such a stipulation, there was no constitutional means by which the central government or its instruments, including the Planning Commission in New Delhi, could instruct the state governments concerning precisely how agrarian reform should be legislated and implemented. Even prior to independence, India's landholding elite took steps to protect their interests in land in anticipation of agrarian reform. When the Indian constitution made agriculture a state subject, it also made plain that the primary responsibility for effecting agrarian reform would rest with the states, thereby reducing the central government's power to define the content of reform and to compel it. Moreover, the conceptualizes of Kerala's reform legislation, while emphasizing "land to the tiller" as an operative principle, defined tillers as those only who assumed the risks of cultivation by providing the cash costs of production.
