Legally Zamindari System of Land Revenue
The Mahalwari system was introduced in 1822 by Holt Mackenzie and Robert Merttins Bird and included the regions of Punjab, central India and western U.P., which accounted for 30% of British India. The Mahalwari system was somewhere between the Zamindari system and the Ryotwari system, under this system several villages were grouped together and the group was known as “Mahal”, a person was chosen as the representative of the “Mahal” and had the duty to pay the income of the “Mahal”. Income could be revised every 20 to 30 years and resembled in one form or another the permanent settlement and was also called the Zamindari temporary settlement. According to J. S. Mill, “peasant landowners associate themselves with the state for a time. The owners did not engage individually with the government, but by villages. [9] Under the Ryotwari Agreement, the government negotiates directly with farmers and does not recognize any intermediaries. Each village is carefully studied and each farmer`s property or plot has been marked and numbered separately. Village maps with exact boundaries, land classification, and names of inhabitants are carefully compiled and preserved, and incomes have been assessed for each resident. This right of occupation can be inherited and transferred by the peasants; therefore, there were also some subleases in Ryotwari provinces. In other respects, the valuation methodology was the same as in the Mahalwari Regulations. [31] Under constant regulation, the protection of farmers` rights, which the government had agreed with the Zamindars in 1793, was long neglected and ensured by subsequent laws.
The tenants of Bengal and the owner of the farming village of Bihar now practically occupy the position of the peasant-owners of Europe and are subject to the magic of property. The first class enjoys all the fruit of its labor and capital, and always a certain position, at least in practice the totality, of undeserved growth. They have a vested interest in improving their land, and agriculture is flourishing among them. Where the Zamindars still levy illegal taxes, this is due to corruption or weakness of the police, but cannot be a necessary consequence of a permanent settlement. Although the settlement was pro-Zamindar, they were too tough to face a number of difficulties. As Daniel Thorner had argued, the creation of private ownership of land was a misnomer, since absolute ownership was retained by imperial authority. [32] The vigilance of magistrates makes this unauthorized blackmail less frequent, just as it removes bait. If a royt is not occupied, he cannot spend his capital on improvements, and the industry becomes discouraged. But the zamindari system is theoretically favorable to agricultural improvement at the expense of the zamindar because it is the permanent owner who can recover his expenses on the land. Since the Zamindari estate is vast, a Zamindar, when dedicated to agriculture, can reap all the benefits of large-scale production, which is impossible in small plots in the Mahalwari and Ryotwari regions.
In the last paragraph, I would like to summarize the final assessment of the consequences of various rural settlements. The process of “wealth flight” that began with the advent of British colonial power in India accelerated through the accumulation of primary capital based on land income. The main channel for diversion of wealth from India to England was trade, but the main source of wealth transfer was the property tax. It was the British government, which first realized to maintain a constant relationship with indigenous peoples in order to become a financially sound leader of India. As a result, they initially focused on economic reforms in India, particularly land reform missions. Not only government officials, but also the English of the homeland undertook to establish several rural settlements in a modified form, equipped with statistical methods under the influence of modern liberal and economic thought. The British East India Company pioneered three large rural settlements in India, namely Permanent, Ryotwari and Mahalwari, which were introduced to different parts of India on the basis of contemporary circumstances and colonial requirements. Basically, it was the modern way to extract maximum income from the peasants, and an absolute plan to constantly plunder Indian resources. Property tax was the British government`s main source of revenue; of 1858-59, out of 18.12 rupee carrots, or 50.3% of its total revenue. [25] It is true that British land reform programs undoubtedly represented a great achievement in the process of agricultural transformation from the Middle Ages to the modern era, resulting in several changes in agricultural methods and their models, revolutionizing several rural and urban areas.