West Bengal case, the most notable aspect of the reform process was not legislative change - many of the central provisions had been on the statute books since the 1950s - but political change at the state level, reinforced by effective institutions at local level. With popular support from panchayati raj institutions and local political representative bodies, well-publicized land settlement camps moved from village to village, updating land records and offering tenants the right to register their tenancies at the same time. This concerted effort between government and citizens' representative bodies helped to bring about a significant shift in the bargaining power of tenants in relation to landlords which was ultimately the key to success".

Tenancy reforms are clearly of continuing relevance in reducing poverty. Two elements are of particular importance, involving both legal and institutional reforms. First, deregulation of land-lease markets is important where attempts are made to ban tenancy outright, since this exacerbates tenure insecurity for tenants. Second is the registration and protection of informal, concealed tenancies along the lines of the West Bengal model. More generally, three critical ingredients of success in implementing reforms in land administration stand out: the importance of collective action at local level, the public nature of proceedings, and state power exercised on behalf of the socially excluded. This is as true of land consolidation in Uttar Pradesh as it is of tenancy reforms in West Bengal, and offers valuable lessons from which to learn in broader efforts to improve land settlement, adjudication and registration.

In the first quantitative study of its kind in India, Besley and Burgess (1998) investigated the relationship between land reforms and poverty reduction at state level, using panel data for the sixteen major states. Their main conclusion is that land reforms do indeed appear to have led to reductions in poverty in India. In their analysis, the authors controlled for other factors that may be associated with poverty reduction, in order to rule out the possibility that land reform activity merely serves as a proxy for other policies<sup>12</sup> . Their detailed analysis finds that while skepticism is warranted with respect to the prospects for redistributing land through land ceilings, the abolition of intermediaries and tenancy reforms (at least in some states) appear to have been more successful in reducing poverty. These findings accord reasonably well with existing, empirically based assessments of the relative success of Indian land reforms.

# A NOTE ON **DATA**

Most published accounts of the size distribution of rural land holdings (e.g. Sharma 1994) use aggregate data from the National Sample Survey (NSS). Aggregate data from agricultural censuses and surveys (e.g. NSS), however, do not present a reliable picture of land distribution, the extent of tenancy, or the terms of tenancy contracts, since landlords tend to

- lIt is also suggested that sharp caste polarization in West Bengal allowed reforms to be promulgated as 'class' reforms without becoming embroiled in the more contentious arena of caste politics (T.V.Somanathan, pers. comm.).

- 12 The specification of the land reformn variable in their analysis raises concerns, however. States are 'classified as high land reform or low land reform depending on whether they had more or less than a total of three land reforms (of any type) during the 1958-92 period'. Thus, the cumulative volume of legislation enacted is taken as the measure of actual change in practice.

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