India's rural land inequality: Top 10% control nearly half of all land

A new study by the World Inequality Lab (WIL) highlights the inequalities in land ownership across rural India, with the top 10 per cent of households controlling 44 per cent of the land.

The report, titled Land Inequality in India: Nature, History, and Markets, also revealed that the top 5 per cent own 32 per cent of land, while a staggering 46 per cent of rural households remain landless.

The paper draws on one of the largest datasets on land ownership in India, covering around 650 million people across 270,000 villages. The findings underscore the depth of rural land concentration, with the top 1 per cent of landowners holding 18 per cent of all rural land.

According to the study, the average village land Gini (an index measuring landholding inequality) reaches 71 when landless households are included, and 46 per cent of rural households are landless.

In some villages, a single landowner controls more than 50 per cent of the agricultural land, highlighting the extreme disparities that persist.

The World Inequality Lab (WIL) is a research laboratory based primarily at the Paris School of Economics (PSE).

The data reveals that agricultural productivity is often strongly linked to greater land inequality. "Villages with more favorable agro-ecological conditions tend to exhibit greater land concentration, increasing the share of land controlled by large landowners," the authors noted.

The study finds that villages under British colonial rule tend to have higher land inequality compared to those that were under Indian rulers. This, the paper argues, is a legacy of colonial land policies that continue to affect modern-day land distribution in rural India.

"Villages with higher shares of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes tend to exhibit higher rates of landlessness, reflecting the enduring role of social hierarchies in structuring access to productive assets," the study concludes.

The paper argues that market access does not fully eliminate historically rooted inequalities. "Proximity to towns, roads, and markets appears insufficient to overturn deeply embedded patterns of land inequality shaped by natural conditions and institutional history," the paper said.

(With inputs from PTI)