Land reforms — c. Zamindari Abolition and Tenancy Reforms

British India collected its revenue through three different land-revenue systems, each creating a different kind of middleman between the state and the person actually working the soil. Independent India spent its first decade trying to abolish one of those middlemen completely, cap how much land anyone could own, and, in one remarkable experiment, simply ask landlords to give some of it away.

In two minutes

Zamindari, Ryotwari and Mahalwari were the three colonial land-revenue systems, and post-independence India's land reforms — Zamindari Abolition Acts, land ceiling laws, and Vinoba Bhave's Bhoodan Movement — tried to undo the inequities the first of these had entrenched.

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