Permanent Settlement
The permanent settlement was in 1793 constant of the East India Company setting the property tax in the management of their areas of Bengal. In India, in pre-colonial times, there were a variety of forms of communal land ownership and derived therefrom lease and dependency relationships. The government wanted to secure by the permanent settlement predictable in the long term income. The measure was, although you thereby renounced to one of the pillars of British colonial rule on a large part of future higher taxes.
Development
About a quarter of a century earlier, in 1765, the East India Company had the Mughal rulers in parts of Bengal wrested the Diwani rights, that is, they had to collect the taxes and duties, a right that the state divan, authorized.
First, the charges were set annually. Already on February 10, 1790 allowed the Governor-General declare a valid setting for ten years. The proposal for a permanent fixing was the Court of Directors sent to, who agreed that on 22 March 1793. The Calcutta Supreme Council approved the measure on May 1 as regulation I. This and the following rules were, according to the Governor-General, known as the Cornwallis Code. Sir John Shore and Charles Grant had opposed a permanent fix, as long as 've been no ordinary surveying the land. They were outvoted.
The zamindars, a class of tax collectors that already existed under the Mughals, were recognized as de facto owners of the land on which they were responsible for the collection of property taxes and could now be expropriated have recourse. Initially, this tax farmers privilege to be auctioned at intervals of 10 years as at auction. Soon, however, the position of the zamindars was to the detriment of the land tilling, again hereditary. Often able to acquire land expropriated living in Calcutta speculators. They controlled everything communal land in their area. The zamindar of Burdwan was at times the largest taxpayers of the Empire.
The system became the foundation of the British system of indirect administration in India in the coming years. The fact that the zamindars now as private owners of the land, similar to the British gentry ( gentry ), for example, in Ireland, were, they could arbitrarily squeeze taxes out of their "subjects". Already Karl Marx recognized that this was only a poor caricature of the landed gentry and an absurd economic experiment. Extorted surpluses remained the zamindars. In Bengal doubled the state revenue, but the burden of farmers and tenants versiebenfachten within three decades. The landowner could now be marketed under the protection of British justice through enforcement ancestral defaulting cultivators of their land. The farmers or tenants whose rights and obligations were particularly determined only by the regulation VII of 1819 were often forced to make debt to moneylenders at exorbitant rates to raise the fees. Especially in the time of drought, which regularly occur by failing monsoon, enlarged zamindars and moneylenders as their lands because the taxes were adopted only in the rarest cases. At the same time, the social structure of the villages has been destroyed over the long term. Protests against the tax burden were the most common cause of uprisings and revolts against the British rule in India and required the establishment of an efficient police force, whose costs were again imposed on the villages.
The Indian National Congress had already called 1900 a reform of land taxation. The Zamindar system of tax-farmers was only abolished by the country Sealing Act after independence, however, compulsory purchase of land reform has been limited. A certain amount of redistribution of farmland Vinoba Bhave reached with his Bhoodan in the 1950s. The consequences of the permanent settlement are still visible today, as the rural areas of West Bengal and Bihar, where reigned the system, are among the poorest in India.
Literature and sources
- Ranajit Guha; A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement; New Delhi ² 1982
- Sirajul Islam; The Permanent Settlement in Bengal: A Study of its operation 1790-1819; Dhaka 1979