Top 10% rural households own 44% land in India: Study, Pg14

Key Highlights:

• Top 10% of rural households in India own 44% of the total land area, while about 46% of households are landless.
• Bihar and Punjab have the highest share of villages where a single landlord owns more than half of the available land.
• The study is based on the Socio-Economic Caste Census 2011, covering 650 million individuals from 270,000 villages across ten major states.
• Kerala has the highest Gini coefficient at 90, indicating high land inequality, followed by Bihar, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, and West Bengal.

Detailed Insights:

• Land ownership is highly concentrated in rural India, with large landholders dominating land control in many villages.
• Bihar and Kerala exhibit high levels of land concentration in terms of top 10%, 5%, or 1% ownership.
• Among states with high agricultural dependency, Rajasthan (34%) and Uttar Pradesh (39%) have lower landlessness compared to Madhya Pradesh (51%) and Bihar (59%).
• Punjab, known for commercial agriculture, has the highest landlessness at 73%.
• Excluding the landless population reduces the Gini coefficient for all states, indicating that landlessness significantly contributes to overall inequality.
• Among landed households, the average landholding size is 6.2 hectares, with 28.9% of land held by households with 0-1 hectares, and 48.6% by households with 1-2 hectares.
• The mean share of land held by the largest landholder in a village is 12.4%, and in 3.8% of villages, the largest landholder owns over 50% of the land.

Key Concepts Involved:

• Gini Coefficient: A measure of statistical dispersion representing income or wealth distribution within a population.
• Landlessness: The condition of individuals or households not owning agricultural land.
• Land Concentration: The extent to which land ownership is concentrated among a small percentage of the population.