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Economic Survey 2025 gives a thumbs up to Kerala land leasing model
- The Economic Survey 2025 highlighted the innovative model of land leasing in the context of the Model Agricultural Land Leasing Act, introduced by Niti Aayog in 2016.
The Economic Survey 2025 on Friday highlighted and praised Kerala's poverty eradication scheme in which groups of women from low-income families lease land to collectively grow a variety of horticulture crops.
“The state government of Kerala has created an innovative arrangement for land leasing,” the Economic Survey 2024-25 said, referring to Kudumbashree launched in 1997. “The initiative has also improved land access for the poor, as more than 85% of the members are under the low-income category.”
The word Kudumbashree means family prosperity in Malayalam.
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Under this model, self-help groups (SHGs) lease land for more than three years. The local gram panchayat becomes a party to this transaction in which a formal contract is registered under the Indian Contract Act of 1872. The formal contract helps the collectives of the poor and landless to access formal services like credit and insurance, from which they are otherwise excluded.
The model encourages farmer collectives to maintain and nurture the quality of the land, with studies indicating an increase in efficiency, observed the survey, presented by Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in Parliament on Friday.
The survey highlighted the innovative model of land leasing in the context of the Model Agricultural Land Leasing Act, introduced by the federal government think-tank Niti Aayog in 2016.
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“The objective (of the model Act) is to improve land access for landless and marginal farmers and provide them with various benefits and protections while safeguarding the rights and interests of landowners,” the survey said.
It added that the states of Andhra Pradesh and Odisha have attempted to introduce some form of land leasing, but the Kerala experiment stands out.
According to the Kerala government, over 91,000 such women groups farmed more than 18,000 hectares in different districts of the state until December 2024.
Landowners are usually reluctant to lease out land to long-term tenants for fear of losing it. In Kerala, many large landowners kept their land fallow, more as a store of value than farming, due to high labour costs. The scheme leveraged this unused land as a tool to improve farm output and provide a livelihood opportunity to landless families.
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“Collective farming can contribute to transforming the identities of rural women from ‘agricultural workers’ and ‘helpers on family farms’ to food producers and more importantly ‘farmers,’” noted a 2021 review of the scheme by The World Bank.
It added that Kerala’s decision to mandate a minimum lease period of three years and improve fallow lands with public funds (under the rural employment guarantee scheme) shows how governments can leverage public finance to improve the lives of vulnerable tenant farmers.
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Business NewsEconomyEconomic Survey 2025 gives a thumbs up to Kerala land leasing model
First Published:31 Jan 2025, 05:02 PM IST
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