efficiency of family farms, includes a renewed emphasis on access to land and the promotion of secure land rights, particularly for the rural poor and socially excluded (World Bank 1997). Restrictions on land rentals, for example, are discouraged as they hurt the poor by restricting the supply of land to rent. Where land distribution is highly unequal, land reform is called for, and lessons from experience suggest that negotiated, decentralized and participatory approaches to land reform hold considerable promise. Institutional reforms lie at the heart of such approaches, and require the careful building of consensus among all stakeholders involved in land administration.

The India CAS identifies regulations around land, labor and capital markets as factors inhibiting private investment. For example, high transaction costs in land markets act as a significant brake on access to land through the market, and the resolution of land disputes is bogged down by an overburdened judicial system. World Bank support to India's poverty alleviation efforts emphasizes the social and economic inclusion of poor and disadvantaged groups, complemented by a growing emphasis on rainfed agriculture within the rural development program. Improving access to land by women is among the priority areas envisaged for Bank support to redress gender inequities, particularly in North India. During public consultations held to support CAS preparation in September 1997, attention was widely drawn to the importance of land rights of the poor, women, and tribals, in the context of poverty reduction strategies.

Land reforms are a major policy focus of the Government of India's Department of Rural Development under the Ninth Plan (1997-2002), following recent reassessment of India's postIndependence land reform experience. State-initiated land reforms are conventionally believed to have been unsuccessful in getting land to the poor in India (albeit with notable exceptions such as West Bengal), although it is widely acknowledged that they have been successful in creating the conditions for agricultural growth by consolidating the position of small and medium farmers. However, recent evidence suggests that much more redistribution has been achieved than is often supposed'. The credible threat of enforcement of ceilings legislation, for example, accounts for much of the redistribution that has taken place through the market, even in 'non-reform' states such as Bihar (Yugandhar and Iyer 1993). Nonetheless, it is now recognized that the prospects for bringing about a meaningful improvement in access to land by the rural poor may be even stronger if attention is also turned to more pragmatic and market-oriented measures, such as the selective liberalization of land-lease markets; the promotion of women's land rights; and efforts to increase transparency in land administration and public access to land records (GOI 1997a). Incremental reforms in land administration, designed to facilitate more rapid, fairer and cheaper conveyancing procedures, are also likely to assist in the implementation of land reform legislation, thereby enabling state-initiated and market-oriented approaches to land reform to complement one another.

In short, policy instruments and mechanisms that improve access to land for the rural poor and socially excluded are of high priority in bringing about efficient, equitable, sustainable,

- **1** See for example the excellent series produced by the Land Reforms Unit of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie, based on extensive field studies carried out by Indian Administrative Service probationers. Four volumes have been published to date: Yugandhar and Iyer (1993), Yugandhar and Datta (1995), Yugandhar (1996), and Aziz and Krishna (1997), dealing with experience in Bihar, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka respectively.

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