Tenancy and fallow land

This article explores the relationship between tenancy and fallow land in rural India. To do so, the article measures the average proportion of land left fallow among households in villages with different tenancy arrangements. The common tenancy arrangements in a village could be either sharecropping, fixed rent, both or none. A particular arrangement could be seen as an institutional form that evolves due to various historical, economic, and social factors. Our study explores the impact of these arrangements on land that is left fallow in two years (2004–05 and 2011–12) for the same set of households using the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) data. We find that the average proportion of owned land that is left fallow by the households is highest (18.3% in 2004–05 and 15.1% in 2011–12) in villages that had no tenancy arrangements and lowest (12.2% in 2004–05 and 6.2% in 2011–12) in villages that had fixed rent as the common tenancy arrangement. These findings are quite robust across farm households of different land class sizes and across farm households with and without irrigation. The results indicate that having tenancy markets could reduce the amount of land left fallow by farm households. In particular, the land left fallow is less among households in villages where the most common form of tenancy is fixed rent tenancy. This does provide a case for liberalising and legalising tenancy. But, care should be taken that such measures do not lead to land concentration among a few by increasing reverse tenancy.