ABSTRACT
The economic reform of 1991 facilitated the economy to attain high and sustained growth, with a few initial years of hiccups. However, the growth has not been uniform across the different sectors. The available data on the performance of agriculture shows stagnation in the initial phase of the economic reform with some improvement in the following decade. The critical change that was brought about with the implementation of new economic policies has caused direct or indirect impacts on the agrarian structure and the associated class relations in India. By making use of various secondary data, the chapter addresses the issue of ‘redistributive land reform’ in the context of Neoliberal globalisation. It is argued that the neo-liberal phase of the economy has witnessed the emergence of ‘land hunger’ class who are willing to cultivate and pay high rent in the land lease market. The share of land held by urban households has increased and the proportion of non-cultivating households who own land has also increased over the last few decades. The chapter further argues that the redistributive land reform may look difficult as the average landholding data shows a continuous decline over the decades, but the agrarian development in the post reform period is such that there is a demand for it from a section of the newly emerging land hunger class.
