Introduction
Agriculture occupies an unusual place in both the Indian and Chinese legal imagination. It is at once the oldest sector of each economy and the one most recently and most deliberately reshaped by law, even though both countries have industrialised at extraordinary speed over the last seventy years. Understanding how each state chose to regulate the relationship between the cultivator and the land is therefore not a narrow exercise in agricultural policy; it is a window into the constitutional character of each State, both of which still hold a considerable agricultural workforce.1
The comparison is a natural one for another reason. India and China are, by most measures, the two most populous nations on Earth and two of the largest producers of food grain, making the legal architecture that governs their farmland a matter of genuine consequence for global food security, not merely domestic welfare. Yet the two countries arrived at their present arrangements by almost opposite routes. India inherited a system of private landholding overlaid by centuries of zamindari and other intermediary tenures, and its post-independence project was to dismantle those intermediary layers gradually, through state legislation operating within a constitutional framework that protects property and vests primary legislative competence over land in the states rather than the Union. China inherited a similar landlord-tenant structure under the late Qing and Republican periods, but its post-1949 project was to abolish private ownership of agricultural land altogether, first through a violent redistribution campaign, then through collectivisation into communes, and finally, after 1978, through a system that keeps ownership formally collective while granting individual households long-term contractual use rights.
This paper is organised as follows. Part II examines the doctrinal and constitutional foundations of land law in the two countries: the Indian doctrines of presumptive title and eminent domain, and the Chinese conception of socialist ownership under the Constitution and the 2020 Civil Code. Part III traces the history of agrarian reform in both countries from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Part IV looks specifically at the signature reform programmes of each country (China’s Great Leap Forward and subsequent Household Responsibility System, and India’s Green Revolution and Bhoodan movement) as case studies in how ideology shapes agricultural law. Part V examines the market institutions that have grown up around each legal regime. Part VI catalogues the principal legal and administrative challenges each system continues to face, including a closer look at India’s short-lived farm laws of 2020 and the litigation they produced. Part VII considers proposed remedies, and Part VIII concludes with a comparative assessment.
A note on method and limitation is appropriate at the outset. This is a comparative legal-historical survey rather than an empirical study, and it draws substantially on state-level legislation from Tamil Nadu as an illustration of how Indian land reform operated in practice, since agriculture in India is a state subject2 and the specific content of reform varied considerably, from Kerala’s more radical land ceilings to the far more limited implementation seen in parts of northern India. The paper does not purport to offer a single verdict on which country’s model has “worked better”; the two systems pursued different values and were tested against different constraints, and this paper’s ambition is to lay out those differences clearly rather than to adjudicate between them.
Constitutional and doctrinal foundations
A. India: presumptive title and constrained eminent domain
Indian land law rests on a foundation that is, by international standards, unusually informal. Unlike many civil law jurisdictions, India has no comprehensive system of state-guaranteed title registration for most agricultural land. Ownership is instead established presumptively, through a chain of registered instruments of transfer, revenue records, and possession, which are treated as evidence of title in a court of law rather than as conclusive proof of it.3 This is sometimes called the doctrine of presumptive title, and it has significant practical consequences: because no government authority certifies who owns a given parcel, disputes over agricultural land are frequently protracted, and the beneficiaries of land reform legislation have sometimes found it difficult to establish, to the satisfaction of a court, that they are entitled to the land that reform legislation nominally granted them. A partial exception exists for certain categories of assigned land. Panchami lands granted to formerly landless communities in Tamil Nadu, for instance, carry conditions restricting alienation, breach of which renders the assignment void, precisely because the ordinary presumptive-title system was thought too weak to protect first-generation beneficiaries from being pressured into selling their land back to more powerful neighbours.
The Indian state’s power to take land from private owners, the doctrine of eminent domain, is likewise constrained in a way that has no real parallel in China.4 Article 31 of the Constitution as originally enacted in 1950 guaranteed a fundamental right to property, and although the Forty-fourth Amendment of 1978, which came into force on 20 June 1979, removed property from the chapter of fundamental rights, it did not abolish the underlying protection; it relocated it to Article 300A, which still provides that no person shall be deprived of their property except by authority of law. The right was thereby changed from a fundamental right into a constitutional right. This means that in India, expropriation of agricultural land, whether for public infrastructure, industrial corridors, or land ceiling legislation, must trace its authority to a specific, validly enacted statute, and is always subject to judicial review for compliance with that statute and with the broader constitutional order. The result has been a legal culture in which land reform in India is unusually legalistic and litigation-heavy: virtually every major land ceiling act, tenancy act, and land acquisition act of the twentieth century was tested, amended, and re-tested in the courts, sometimes for decades, before its provisions could be fully implemented on the ground.
B. China: socialist ownership and “expropriation”
Article 10 of the 1982 Constitution of the People’s Republic of China vests ownership of rural land in collectives rather than in individuals, a structural choice with consequences that ripple through every later reform this paper discusses: no matter how far China’s reforms since 1978 have gone in restoring individual control over farming decisions, the underlying title to the land itself has never reverted to private ownership.5
The 2020 Civil Code, China’s first comprehensive codification of private law, gives some content to what “ownership” means within that collective framework. Article 240 of the Civil Code defines ownership (suoyouquan) as an owner’s right, in accordance with law, to possess, use, benefit from, and dispose of their own property, a formula that maps loosely onto the Roman-law trio of usus, fructus, and abusus, familiar to common lawyers as the incidents of ownership. But this definitional clarity coexists with what commentators have long described as a relatively thin body of law specifically governing collective property; the basic constitutional statement in Article 10 has not, in practice, been elaborated into a detailed statutory regime with the same precision as the Civil Code’s treatment of individual and state property, leaving collective enterprises and rural collectives in a comparatively uncertain legal position.6
Where India speaks of eminent domain, China speaks of expropriation or requisition, and the concept operates with far fewer external constraints. The state’s power to take collectively owned land for public use is, as a matter of constitutional structure, close to absolute, tempered mainly by internal Party and administrative discipline rather than by an independent judiciary willing to strike down takings. This produces two contrasting patterns of legal pathology that recur throughout the sections below. India’s system tends to fail through delay, litigation, and the political power of large landholders to resist implementation; China’s system tends to fail through the opposite problem: takings that proceed quickly but sometimes with inadequate compensation, contested definitions of “public interest”, and localised abuses by officials with little judicial check.7
Historical evolution of agrarian reform
A. China
The history of Chinese land law is inseparable from the history of Chinese state formation over recent centuries, and it is worth tracing briefly because the current system cannot be fully understood except as a reaction against what came before it.8
The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 marks the sharpest discontinuity in this history. In the early 1950s the Chinese Communist Party carried out a nationwide land reform campaign that redistributed land taken from landlords directly to the peasantry, a process that was often accompanied by public “struggle sessions” against landlords and, in many areas, considerable violence.9 Whatever one’s assessment of its methods, the campaign served two purposes simultaneously: it broke the economic power of the rural gentry that had historically stood as a rival to central authority, and it built a base of grateful, land-owning peasants whose loyalty helped consolidate the new Party-state. This first redistribution, however, proved to be only a way-station. Within a few years the Party moved to collectivise the very landholdings it had just distributed, and it did so in stages rather than all at once. Households were first organised into small mutual-aid teams that pooled labour and draft animals while retaining individual land titles; these were then consolidated into lower-stage agricultural producers’ cooperatives, in which land was pooled but households were still compensated partly according to the land they had contributed; and these were in turn merged into higher-stage cooperatives that dispensed with land-based compensation entirely, paying members according to labour alone. By the late 1950s this incremental process culminated in the vast People’s Communes, which absorbed the cooperatives into administrative units that combined local government, collective economic organisation, and increasingly militarised social life under a single structure: a far more totalising form of collectivisation than the cooperative stages that preceded it, and one whose consequences are examined in Part IV.A.10
The late 1970s brought the second great discontinuity: the Reform and Opening-Up era inaugurated under Deng Xiaoping. Beginning with experiments in a handful of provinces and rapidly generalised nationwide, agricultural decision-making was returned to the household level even as formal collective ownership of the underlying land was retained, an arrangement examined in more detail in Part IV.B. Over the following decades this evolved further into a legal environment in which contract farming and, increasingly, large-scale agribusiness became significant features of the rural economy, a marked departure from the commune-based collectivism of the preceding three decades. The overall trajectory of Chinese agrarian law over roughly a century, then, is not a single continuous line but a sequence of sharp reversals (landlordism, revolutionary redistribution, collectivisation, and market-oriented decollectivisation), each one a considered response to the perceived failures of the arrangement it replaced.11
B. India
India’s trajectory has been less dramatic in its reversals but no less consequential in its cumulative effect. At independence in 1947, and under the Constitution that came into force in 1950, Indian agriculture was still substantially organised around intermediary tenures (zamindari, jagirdari, and similar systems inherited from colonial revenue administration), under which a class of intermediaries held rights over land actually cultivated by tenant farmers and extracted rent, often on onerous terms, without themselves engaging in cultivation. The framers of the Constitution placed “agriculture” within the State List of the Seventh Schedule, meaning that primary legislative competence over land reform rests with the state legislatures rather than Parliament, a structural choice that has produced significant variation in the pace and content of reform across the country.
From the 1950s through the 1970s, most Indian states enacted zamindari abolition legislation and, subsequently, land ceiling laws intended to cap the maximum landholding of any individual or family and redistribute the surplus to landless cultivators. Tamil Nadu is a useful illustration of how this process unfolded at the state level. The Tamil Nadu Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling on Land) Act, 1961, which came into force retrospectively from 6 April 1960, initially fixed the ceiling for a family of five members at thirty standard acres, with an additional five standard acres permitted for each additional family member up to an overall cap of sixty standard acres. This ceiling did not remain static. The Tamil Nadu Land Reforms (Reduction of Ceiling on Land) Act, 1970, lowered the basic family ceiling from thirty to fifteen standard acres, and the overall family cap was correspondingly reduced by later amending Acts in 1972, so that the ceiling actually in force today is considerably tighter than the thirty-acre figure with which the 1961 Act began, a point on which some secondary summaries of the Act are imprecise, since they describe the original 1961 ceiling without registering the subsequent reductions.12 Alongside the ceiling legislation, Tamil Nadu also enacted a cluster of tenancy statutes that addressed the position of cultivators who worked land they did not own: the Cultivating Tenants Protection Act, 1955, which shielded tenant farmers from arbitrary eviction; the Cultivating Tenants (Payment of Fair Rent) Act, 1956, which established a mechanism for fixing fair rent; the Agricultural Lands Record of Tenancy Rights Act, 1969, which mandated the creation of authoritative tenancy records; the Occupants of Kudiyiruppu (Conferment of Ownership) Act, 1971, which conferred ownership on long-term occupants of homestead land under the traditional kudiyiruppu arrangement; and the Rural Artisans (Conferment of Ownership of Kudiyiruppu) Act, 1976, which extended the benefit of the 1971 Act to rural artisans, non-farmers bound up with the livelihood of the village who were trapped by the same debt and tenancy as field hands. Comparable legislative programmes, of varying scope and rigour, were enacted in Kerala and West Bengal, both states in which land reform is generally regarded as having been implemented with unusual thoroughness.13
It is worth pausing on the zamindari abolition legislation of the early 1950s specifically, since it is the true starting point of Indian land reform and is sometimes elided in comparative accounts that jump straight to the ceiling laws of the 1960s. The zamindari system, formalised most influentially by the Permanent Settlement of 1793 in Bengal, had created a class of revenue-collecting intermediaries who held rights over land without themselves cultivating it, extracting rent from the tenant cultivators who actually worked the soil. Beginning with Madras in 1948, then Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the early 1950s, and eventually extending across virtually every state with a significant zamindari presence, state legislatures abolished these intermediary tenures, vesting land directly in the state and, through subsequent tenancy legislation, conferring occupancy or ownership rights on the actual cultivators. This first wave of reform was, in constitutional terms, the most contested. Zamindars challenged the abolition Acts as violating the fundamental right to property then guaranteed under Articles 19(1)(f) and 31, and Parliament responded with the First, Fourth, and Seventeenth Constitutional Amendments, the First having inserted the Ninth Schedule, specifically to insulate land reform legislation from being struck down on property-rights grounds. This was an early and instructive example of the interpretive tug-of-war between agrarian reform and constitutional property protection that would recur throughout the following decades and would only be resolved, in the sense of settling that Parliament could not use the Ninth Schedule to place laws entirely beyond judicial review, by the Supreme Court’s later basic structure jurisprudence.14
The 1960s and 1970s also brought the Green Revolution, discussed separately in Part IV.C, and by the turn of the twenty-first century the character of India’s agrarian challenges had shifted from the classic problem of intermediary landlordism toward a newer set of problems: water scarcity, rising input costs, chronic indebtedness and farmer suicides in some regions, and unresolved debates over the proper legal framework for contract farming and agricultural marketing, culminating in the short-lived farm laws of 2020 examined in Part VI.C.
Signature reform programmes: ideology in agricultural law
A. China’s Great Leap Forward
Although the Great Leap Forward was more an economic and cultural campaign than a complete agrarian reform, the initiative, launched in 1958, sought to accelerate agricultural and industrial production simultaneously by communising property rights, that is, by transferring what remained of private and cooperative property into vast People’s Communes that fused agricultural and industrial activity under unified local Party control. Communes were tasked not only with farming but with industrial production, most famously through “backyard furnaces”, small and technically primitive steel-smelting operations set up in rural areas in an effort to meet industrial targets. The campaign was driven less by technical planning than by ideological conviction and pressure to demonstrate revolutionary fervour, which had the effect of suppressing the kind of realistic, dissenting technical feedback that might otherwise have flagged the unworkability of many local targets; combined with catastrophic weather and inflated production figures, this resulted in food shortages. Agricultural statistics reported up the chain of command during this period were frequently and dramatically inflated, and grain procurement quotas were set against those inflated figures, stripping many rural communities of food. Combined with disruptions to farming caused by the diversion of labour into industrial and infrastructure projects, and by rapidly shifting economic directives that gave communities little stability to plan around, the Great Leap Forward precipitated a catastrophic famine before the policy was substantially abandoned in the early 1960s. The episode remains a central reference point in Chinese agricultural history precisely because it demonstrates, in the starkest possible terms, the danger of a land-and-food system in which local price and production signals are entirely displaced by centrally set ideological policies, which failed under the conditions then prevailing.15
B. China’s Household Responsibility System
The corrective to the commune model came two decades later, beginning around 1978, in what is generally called the Household Responsibility System (HRS). Rather than restoring private ownership of land, the HRS restored farmers’ autonomy in production and provided economic incentives by allowing them to enjoy the residual benefits of their labour. The system was characterised by equitable distribution and periodic redistribution of agricultural land among households, ensuring equality of opportunity, while ownership rights were divided among the State, village collectives and individual farming households, resulting in a system of split ownership rather than complete private ownership. The implementation of the HRS significantly contributed to agricultural productivity, increased rural household incomes, reduced poverty, encouraged rural industrialisation and urbanisation, promoted the growth of private enterprises and strengthened economic participation at the village level. The HRS thus represented a significant institutional and economic transformation in China, balancing collective ownership with individual economic autonomy and demonstrating the importance of property rights, incentives and decentralised decision-making in rural development.16 The reform further expanded farmers’ ability to sell surplus produce on open markets, and this decollectivisation of decision-making, while leaving formal land ownership collective, is the foundation of the contemporary Chinese system discussed further in Parts V.B and VI.B.
C. India’s Green Revolution
India’s most consequential mid-century agricultural intervention was not a change in ownership structure at all, but a change in agronomic technology backed by supportive state policy. Two decades after the Bengal Famine of 1943, the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s introduced high-yielding variety seeds, chemical fertilisers, expanded irrigation, and more capital-intensive cultivation practices, principally in the wheat- and rice-growing regions of Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh. The results, measured purely in output, were dramatic: India moved within roughly a decade from a nation dependent on food aid to one that had achieved substantial self-sufficiency in staple grains. But the Green Revolution’s very success generated a distinct set of second-order legal and policy problems that persist to this day: a widening gap between the prosperous, irrigated, well-connected farming regions that benefited most and the rain-fed regions that benefited far less; a structural dependence on purchased inputs (seed, fertiliser, groundwater extraction) that has left many cultivators exposed to price shocks and, in some documented regions, to unsustainable groundwater depletion; and environmental costs from intensive chemical use that later legislation and policy have had to address only belatedly. Much of the elaborate state apparatus discussed in Part V.A (minimum support prices, state procurement through the Food Corporation of India, and regulated wholesale markets) took its present shape substantially in order to manage the market consequences of Green Revolution-era surpluses and price volatility.17
D. India’s Bhoodan movement
Where the Green Revolution operated through technology and state procurement policy, the Bhoodan (land-gift) movement operated through moral suasion entirely outside the machinery of the state. Founded by the Gandhian reformer Vinoba Bhave in 1951, the movement asked landowners to donate a portion of their holdings voluntarily to landless peasants, framing the appeal explicitly in the register of non-violence and voluntary redistribution that Bhave had inherited from Gandhi. The movement achieved genuine, if limited, success in mobilising donated land in several states during the 1950s and 1960s. Its structural weakness, however, was built into its method: because Bhoodan relied entirely on the voluntary goodwill of landowners rather than on legal compulsion, the quantity of land actually transferred fell well short of what would have been required to make a substantial dent in India’s land-inequality problem. Critics also alleged that much of the land donated was of marginal agricultural quality or subject to unresolved title disputes that limited its usefulness to the intended beneficiaries, a charge Cholkar contests: one study in western Maharashtra found that donors of disputed land, or of land given for applause, were only 13 to 14 per cent of all donors.18 Bhoodan is nonetheless historically significant as the clearest instance of a purely voluntary, civil-society-driven alternative to the statutory land ceiling programmes discussed in Part III.B, and its limitations are frequently cited in Indian legal scholarship as an argument for why land redistribution ultimately required binding legislation rather than moral appeal alone.
Market structures
A. India
Indian agricultural marketing law has had to contend with a supply chain that is, by design and by history, long and fragmented: produce typically passes from cultivator to local trader or commission agent, then through one or more layers of wholesale intermediaries, before reaching the retail consumer, which has made it administratively difficult to guarantee farmers a definite minimum realisation for their produce. Three institutions dominate the legal landscape here. The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare is the central government body responsible for formulating and implementing agricultural policy generally, including marketing policy, though its direct legislative reach over agricultural markets is constitutionally limited by the state-list character of the subject. The Food Corporation of India, a public sector undertaking established in 1965, procures and stores food grains, principally wheat and rice, at government-announced minimum support prices, both to guarantee farmers a floor price and to maintain buffer stocks for national food security and the public distribution system. Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees, established under state-level APMC Acts, regulate wholesale agricultural markets within each state, licensing traders and commission agents and, in principle, protecting farmers from being forced to sell at distress prices to a single unregulated buyer. Each of these institutions has attracted its own body of criticism (the FCI for the fiscal and storage burden of open-ended procurement, and the APMC system for allegedly entrenching a class of licensed intermediaries whose commissions raise costs without adding commensurate value), criticism that fed directly into the 2020 legislative reforms discussed in Part VI.C.19
B. China
China’s rural market structure cannot be understood without reference to the hukou household registration system, introduced in 1958, which assigns every individual an official registration as either an urban or a rural resident of a specific locality.20 Access to a wide range of social benefits and public services (education, healthcare, formal housing, social insurance, and, historically, urban employment itself) has been tied to this registration, and the system’s core effect has been to restrict the free movement of the rural population into cities even as China’s cities industrialised. The hukou system has been associated with three overlapping fault lines in the country’s development: a widening gap between agricultural and industrial incomes, a widening gap between urban and rural living standards, and significant unevenness of economic growth across regions, together producing a pattern of uneven, spatially concentrated development rather than uniformly distributed growth. These restrictions have been progressively relaxed rather than abolished. As part of a 2019 national urbanisation agenda, the central government moved to eliminate hukou-based settlement restrictions in cities with an urban permanent population under three million and to substantially ease them in cities of between three and five million, while restrictions in the very largest megacities remain considerably tighter.21 The net effect is a market structure in which labour mobility, and therefore the capacity of rural households to diversify income away from agriculture, remains shaped as much by household registration law as by ordinary market forces.
Legal challenges
A. India
Several recurring problems have limited the practical effectiveness of India’s land reform legislation, notwithstanding its often-ambitious statutory design. Political resistance from larger landholders, who have historically enjoyed disproportionate influence in state and local politics, has slowed or diluted the implementation of ceiling legislation in many states,22 and government schemes intended for smallholders and landless labourers have at times been diverted, through falsified records, by locally powerful persons. Land records in India have long suffered from inaccuracy and incompleteness. A persistent and well-documented consequence is that the Indian state has, at various points, lacked reliable aggregate data on exactly how many farmers there are in the country and which of them are entitled cultivators as opposed to landless labourers, a gap that leaves genuine beneficiaries vulnerable to exploitation and complicates any attempt to target welfare programmes accurately.23 Awareness of legal rights remains uneven among marginalised rural communities, many of whom lack practical access to courts or legal aid to enforce entitlements that exist on paper. Bureaucratic delay and corruption continue to undermine implementation in concrete ways: delays in the disbursal of crop insurance payouts to farmers, for example, have been the subject of recurring public protest.24 These problems are compounded by a broader lack of transparency and accountability in land administration that makes it difficult for either beneficiaries or oversight bodies to track whether reform programmes are actually achieving their stated purposes.
B. China
China’s contemporary agrarian legal challenges are, in a sense, the accumulated unfinished business of the reforms described in Part IV.B. First, farmers who cultivate land under the Household Responsibility System hold contractual use rights rather than full ownership; because the underlying collective retains title, and although use-right contracts are now generally granted for extended terms, farmers face a persistent degree of tenure insecurity that can discourage long-horizon investment in the land itself. Second, the transferability of these land use rights remains restricted. Pilot programmes in various provinces experimented with limited markets in land use rights, but under the Rural Land Contract Law of 2002 an outright transfer of the contracting right needed the consent of the contract-issuing collective, and the right could be neither mortgaged nor invested as shares in companies. The amendment adopted on 29 December 2018, in force from 1 January 2019, separated a right to manage the land from the household’s contracting right, and the household may now decide for itself to transfer that management right to others by lease, shareholding or other lawful means. These restrictions constrained the development of a fully functioning rural land market and made it harder for farmers to consolidate holdings, achieve economies of scale, or reallocate land quickly in response to changing market demand.25 Notwithstanding statutory protections for farmers’ land use entitlements, enforcement of those protections is often weak in practice, particularly where local governments or development projects seek to expropriate land for non-agricultural use: farmers in these situations risk either outright loss of land or compensation well below the land’s true value, a risk compounded by documented corruption within local land administration systems.26 Environmental regulation of agricultural land use remains comparatively underdeveloped: the intensive cultivation encouraged under the contract responsibility system has been associated with soil erosion, water pollution, and excessive use of fertiliser and pesticide, and the legislative framework governing land contracts has not yet been fully integrated with environmental protection law in a way that would systematically discourage these practices.27 Perhaps most consequentially, the rural-urban income and welfare gap discussed in Part V.B continued to widen through the 2000s even as agricultural reform generated aggregate economic growth,28 meaning that the legal framework has yet to ensure that rural communities share proportionately in the benefits of the reforms conducted in their name. The gap has since been narrowing: the ratio of urban to rural per capita income, which stood at about 3.3 at the end of the 2000s, fell to about 2.4 by 2023.29
C. A case study: India’s farm laws of 2020
No episode illustrates the contemporary legal and political stakes of Indian agricultural marketing law better than the controversy surrounding the three central farm laws enacted in September 2020: the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020, the Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020, and the Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020. The laws were designed, broadly, to permit farmers to sell produce outside the regulated APMC mandi system, to enable contract farming arrangements directly with private buyers, and to deregulate stockholding limits on essential commodities: reforms that their proponents argued would modernise a marketing structure widely regarded as inefficient, and that their opponents, principally farmer organisations from Punjab and Haryana, argued would undermine the minimum support price system and expose smallholders to the bargaining power of large private buyers without adequate protection. The resulting protests, sustained for more than a year at the borders of Delhi, produced significant litigation. In Rakesh Vaishnav v. Union of India, by an interim order of 12 January 2021, the Supreme Court of India, while declining at that stage to rule definitively on the constitutionality of the three statutes, stayed their implementation, directed that the pre-existing minimum support price arrangements continue undisturbed in the interim, and constituted a four-member committee to hear the grievances of farmers and the views of the Government.30 The committee’s composition proved controversial in its own right: farmer unions, which declined to participate before it, objected that some of its members had earlier spoken in favour of the laws; one member recused himself, and the Court expressed strong displeasure at the aspersions cast on the members.31 The dispute was ultimately resolved not by judicial verdict but by legislative reversal: in November 2021 the central government announced its intention to repeal the three laws, and Parliament formally did so through the Farm Laws Repeal Act, 2021, before the Supreme Court had occasion to rule on the underlying constitutional questions.32 The episode stands as a striking illustration of a broader theme in Indian agrarian law: even a facially well-intentioned central reform can be brought to a halt by the combination of concentrated regional political mobilisation, an independent judiciary willing to intervene at an interim stage, and the states’ underlying constitutional primacy over agricultural policy.
Proposed remedies
A. China
Chinese and international commentary on the challenges catalogued in Part VI.B has converged on a broadly consistent set of recommendations. Clarifying and strengthening the legal content of land use rights, including lengthening and stabilising contract terms and reducing the discretion available to local officials to alter or terminate them, is generally regarded as the most fundamental reform needed to encourage long-term agricultural investment. A more transparent and rules-based system for land use right transfers, replacing ad hoc administrative approval with a genuine, if still regulated, land use rights market, has been proposed as a way of improving the allocation of land to more productive uses without abandoning collective ownership as a matter of principle. Improving rural governance through greater transparency in land administration, stronger anti-corruption measures, and more meaningful participation by farmers themselves in decisions affecting their land is frequently identified as a precondition for the other reforms to have their intended effect rather than being captured by local elites. Investment in environmentally sustainable agricultural practice, including support for organic and lower-input farming and for agricultural research more broadly, has been proposed to address the environmental costs documented above. And bridging the rural-urban gap through sustained investment in rural infrastructure, education, and healthcare, alongside continued relaxation of hukou-based mobility restrictions, is widely regarded as necessary if the benefits of agricultural reform are to be shared more broadly across Chinese society rather than concentrated in already-prosperous regions.
B. India
The Indian literature identifies a parallel, though not identical, set of remedies. Greater transparency in the allocation of agricultural subsidies, credit, and welfare schemes, including robust, digitised, and regularly updated land and tenancy records, has been proposed as the single most important step toward reducing the diversion of benefits to those not legally entitled to them. Strengthening the underlying legal framework itself, through clearer statutory drafting, better recordkeeping infrastructure, and more effective and timely enforcement mechanisms, would address some of the ambiguity that has historically allowed powerful landholders to resist or evade ceiling legislation. Sustained investment in legal literacy and rights-awareness programmes targeted at marginalised rural communities, coupled with expanded access to legal aid and representation, would help ensure that entitlements that exist on paper can actually be enforced by the people they are meant to benefit. Finally, addressing corruption and inefficiency within land administration through structural reform, rather than through episodic anti-corruption campaigns alone, is widely regarded as necessary if the underlying legislative programme is to translate into the outcomes it was designed to achieve.
Comparative discussion and conclusion
Placed side by side, the Indian and Chinese experiences of agrarian reform read almost like a controlled experiment in political economy, except that neither country designed its reforms with the other consciously in mind, and both were responding primarily to their own internal political and historical pressures. China’s model prioritised speed and uniformity, and it achieved rapid, centrally directed transformation in land tenure not once but twice (first through revolutionary redistribution, then through decollectivisation), at the cost, at least during the Great Leap Forward, of catastrophic human suffering when centralised planning became detached from agronomic and economic reality. India’s model prioritised individual legal process and federal deference, and it achieved a more gradual, more contested, but arguably more legally durable transformation, at the cost of leaving substantial gaps between statutory entitlement and practical enjoyment of land rights, gaps that persist today in the form of inaccurate records, slow enforcement, and the disproportionate political influence of larger landholders.
Neither system has fully solved the problem each was designed to address. China continues to wrestle with the tension between collective title and individual security of tenure, with the limits on transferability of land use rights, and with a rural-urban divide that hukou reform has narrowed but not yet eliminated. India continues to wrestle with fragmented and unreliable land records, uneven enforcement of tenancy and ceiling legislation across states, and, as the farm laws episode demonstrated, a marketing framework whose reform remains politically fraught even when its underlying economic logic commands significant expert support. What both systems illustrate, from opposite directions, is that agrarian reform is never a single legislative act but an ongoing process of adjustment, in which the law that redistributes land in one decade routinely has to be revisited, amended, or, in India’s case, sometimes repealed, in the next.
One thread that runs through almost every section of this paper, and that is worth drawing out explicitly in conclusion, is the strikingly different role played by the judiciary in each system. In India, courts are not merely a forum for resolving disputes about the application of agrarian statutes; they are active participants in shaping the content and pace of reform itself, from the mid-century constitutional amendments needed to shield zamindari abolition from property-rights challenges, to the basic structure doctrine that eventually cabined Parliament’s power to insulate legislation from judicial review altogether, to the Supreme Court’s willingness in Rakesh Vaishnav to stay the operation of duly enacted central legislation pending a fuller hearing on its constitutionality. Land reform in India has therefore always proceeded partly through the legislature and partly through continuous negotiation with an independent judiciary that retains genuine power to slow, reshape, or in effect nullify legislative choices. In China, by contrast, the courts play an essentially limited role in agrarian policy; the relevant checks on state power over land, such as they are, operate through internal Party discipline, administrative appeal, and periodic central policy directives rather than through independent judicial review of expropriation decisions or collective-ownership disputes. This is not merely a technical difference in institutional design; it reflects the more fundamental divergence in constitutional philosophy identified in Part II, between an Indian system built around enforceable individual entitlement and a Chinese system built around collective ownership under Party-led administration.
Comparing the two, then, is less useful as an exercise in ranking one model above the other than as an exercise in identifying trade-offs. A more centralised, state-directed model of the Chinese type can achieve uniform, rapid change but is exposed to catastrophic failure when central planning loses contact with local reality, and it continues to struggle with questions of tenure security and rural-urban equity that flow directly from its retention of collective title. A more decentralised, judicially constrained model of the Indian type protects individual legal process and accommodates regional variation, but is exposed to prolonged implementation gaps, litigation delay, and capture by locally powerful interests. Both countries, moreover, continue to legislate and litigate actively in this space (China through ongoing refinement of land use right transfer rules and hukou policy, India through the recent and unresolved debate over agricultural marketing reform), which suggests that agrarian law in both countries should be understood not as a settled historical achievement but as a live and continuing negotiation between the state, the market, and the cultivator. A definitive judgment on which approach has “succeeded” would require a far more granular empirical study than the present comparative-legal survey can offer; what this paper has attempted instead is to make the structure of that choice, and its recurring consequences in each country, visible side by side.
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Footnotes
1. India Const. arts. 31A, 31B, 246, sched. VII, list II; Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, (1973) 4 SCC 225 (India).
2. India Const. sched. VII, list II, entries 14, 18.
3. Suraj Bhan v. Financial Commissioner, (2007) 6 SCC 186, 190 (India); Jitendra Singh v. State of Madhya Pradesh, 2021 SCC OnLine SC 802 (India).
4. K.T. Plantation (P) Ltd. v. State of Karnataka, (2011) 9 SCC 1 (India).
5. Xianfa art. 10 (1982) (China).
6. Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China arts. 240, 261 (2020) (China).
7. Xianfa arts. 10, 13 (1982) (China); Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China art. 243 (2020) (China).
8. Jingshan Dong, Seventy Years of Changes in China’s Rural Land System: Review, Enlightenment and Outlook, 9 Int’l J. Rural L. & Pol’y 1 (2019), https://doi.org/10.5130/ijrlp.1.2019.6156.
9. Brian DeMare, Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution, introduction (Stanford Univ. Press 2019), https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/land-wars/excerpt/excerpt-introduction.
10. Collectivisation of Agriculture (农业集体化) (1953–1958) Overview, Chinese Hist. for Tchrs., https://chinesehistoryforteachers.omeka.net/exhibits/show/collective-agriculture/collectivisation-overview (last visited Nov. 6, 2026).
11. Reform and Opening Up, TheoryChina (May 4, 2021), https://en.theorychina.org.cn/c/2021-05-04/1393227.shtml (last visited Nov. 6, 2026).
12. Tamil Nadu Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling on Land) Act, 1961, T.N. Act 58 of 1961, § 5 (India); Tamil Nadu Land Reforms (Reduction of Ceiling on Land) Act, 1970, T.N. Act 17 of 1970 (India); Tamil Nadu Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling on Land) Second Amendment Act, 1972, T.N. Act 20 of 1972 (India); Tamil Nadu Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling on Land) Third Amendment Act, 1972, T.N. Act 37 of 1972 (India); Tamil Nadu Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling on Land) Fourth Amendment Act, 1972, T.N. Act 39 of 1972 (India).
13. The Tamil Nadu Cultivating Tenants Protection Act, 1955, T.N. Act 25 of 1955 (India); The Tamil Nadu Cultivating Tenants (Payment of Fair Rent) Act, 1956, T.N. Act 24 of 1956 (India); The Tamil Nadu Agricultural Lands Record of Tenancy Rights Act, 1969, T.N. Act 10 of 1969 (India); The Tamil Nadu Occupants of Kudiyiruppu (Conferment of Ownership) Act, 1971, T.N. Act 40 of 1971 (India); The Tamil Nadu Rural Artisans (Conferment of Ownership of Kudiyiruppu) Act, 1976, T.N. Act 38 of 1976 (India).
14. I.R. Coelho (Dead) by LRs. v. State of Tamil Nadu, (2007) 2 SCC 1 (India) (holding that laws added to the Ninth Schedule on or after Apr. 24, 1973, the date of the judgment in Kesavananda Bharati, supra note 1, are open to judicial review if they violate the basic structure of the Constitution).
15. Peng-Khuang Chong, Mao’s Great Leap Forward Brings Chaos to China, EBSCO Research Starters (2021), https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/maos-great-leap-forward-brings-chaos-china/.
16. Gaofeng Meng, China’s Household Responsibility System in Contemporary China II: Its Features and Outcomes 1 (SOAS Univ. of London Sch. of L., Gender & Media, Working Paper No. 7, Nov. 30, 2024), https://soas.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2024-12/Chinas%20Household%20Responsibility%20System%20in%20Contemporary%20China%20II-%20Its%20Features%20and%20Outcomes-Gaofeng%20Meng%208-9%20December%202024.pdf.
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19. Bhavyya Sharma & Vanita Khanna, Evolution of Agricultural Produce Market Regulation in India, 6 Indian J. Integrated Rsch. L. 158, 158 (2026), https://ijirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/11.-EVOLUTION-OF-AGRICULTURAL-PRODUCE-MARKET-REGULATION-IN-INDIA.pdf.
20. Kam Wing Chan & Li Zhang, The Hukou System and Rural-Urban Migration in China: Processes and Changes, 160 China Q. 818 (1999), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305741000001351.
21. Zoey Ye Zhang, China Is Relaxing Hukou Restrictions in Small and Medium-Sized Cities, China Briefing (Apr. 17, 2019), https://www.china-briefing.com/news/china-relaxing-hukou-restrictions-small-medium-sized-cities/; Nat’l Dev. & Reform Comm’n, Notice on Issuing the Key Tasks for New-Type Urbanization Construction in 2019 (Fa Gai Gui Hua [2019] No. 617, Mar. 31, 2019) (China), https://www.ndrc.gov.cn/xwdt/ztzl/xxczhjs/ghzc/202012/t20201224_1260132.html.
22. Abhijit Banerjee & Lakshmi Iyer, History, Institutions and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India (SSRN Working Paper, 2002), https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.321721, published in 95 Am. Econ. Rev. 1190 (2005).
23. R. Nirmal, How Many Farmers Are There in India? Government Has No Clue, Hindu BusinessLine (Jan. 21, 2020), https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/economy/agri-business/how-many-farmers-are-there-in-india-government-has-no-clue/article30614882.ece.
24. Sruthisagar Yamunan & Arunabh Saikia, In Tamil Nadu and Assam, Farmers’ Crop Insurance Claims Are Being Bounced Between State Agencies, Scroll.in (July 10, 2017), https://scroll.in/article/842545; Priya Ranjan Sahu, Farmers on Hunger Strike in Sambalpur Due to Non-Payment of Crop Insurance, Down To Earth (Oct. 22, 2019), https://www.downtoearth.org.in/agriculture/farmers-on-hunger-strike-in-sambalpur-due-to-non-payment-of-crop-insurance-67358.
25. Yuk-Shing Cheng & Kim-Sau Chung, Designing Property Rights over Land in Rural China, 128 Econ. J. 2676, 2676–2710 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12552; see also Dong, supra note 8 (on article 36 of the Rural Land Contract Law as amended on Dec. 29, 2018).
26. Klaus Deininger & Songqing Jin, Securing Property Rights in Transition: Lessons from Implementation of China’s Rural Land Contracting Law, 70 J. Econ. Behav. & Org. 22, 22–38 (2009), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2009.01.001.
27. Daisong Yu et al., Abatement Effects of Agricultural Non-Point Pollution from Land System Reforms: A Case Study of the Farmland “Three Rights Separation” Reform in China, 14 Agric. 927 (2024), https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture14060927.
28. Zhaolin Wang et al., A Multidimensional Investigation on Spatiotemporal Characteristics and Influencing Factors of China’s Urban-Rural Income Gap (URIG) Since the 21st Century, 148 Cities 104920 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2024.104920.
29. Nat’l Bureau of Stat. of China, China Statistical Yearbook 2025 (China Stat. Press 2025), https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/ndsj/; China Wealth Gap Widened in 2009: State Media, Agence France-Presse (Mar. 2, 2010), https://terradaily.com/china-wealth-gap-widened-in-2009-state-media-999/ (reporting a 2009 urban-rural income ratio of 3.33 to 1); China’s Per Capita Disposable Income Grows 6.3 Pct in 2023, Gov.cn (Jan. 17, 2024), https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202401/17/content_WS65a73d26c6d0868f4e8e32e0.html (reporting 2023 urban and rural per capita disposable incomes of 51,821 and 21,691 yuan).
30. Rakesh Vaishnav v. Union of India, (2021) 1 SCC 590, 2021 SCC OnLine SC 18 (India) (interim order of Jan. 12, 2021, in W.P. (C) No. 1118 of 2020); see also Breaking: Farm Laws Implementation Stayed, Committee Formed for Talks, MSP to Continue: Read Summary of Supreme Court Directions, LiveLaw (Jan. 12, 2021), https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/farmlaws-stayed-supreme-court-farmers-protest-168307.
31. ‘Where’s Question of Bias?’: SC Irked over Comments About Farm Law Committee, The News Minute (Press Trust of India, Jan. 20, 2021), https://www.thenewsminute.com/news/wheres-question-bias-sc-irked-over-comments-about-farm-law-committee-141830.
32. The Farm Laws Repeal Act, 2021, No. 40, Acts of Parliament, 2021 (India).