Permanent settlement
The Permanent Settlement was the establishment of property tax in the areas of Bengal it administered in 1793 by the East India Company . In pre-colonial India, there were a variety of forms of communal land ownership and the lease and dependency relationships derived from them. The government wanted to secure predictable income in the long term through permanent settlement . The measure became one of the main pillars of British colonial rule, although it did away with much of the future higher taxes.
development
About a quarter of a century earlier, in 1765, the East India Company had the Mogul -Herrschern in parts of Bengal, the Diwani wrested privileges, which means they had to collect the taxes, a right that the sofa condition, authorized.
Initially, the taxes were set annually. As early as February 10, 1790, the governor-general had a ten-year assessment announced. The proposal for a permanent assessment was forwarded to the Court of Directors , which approved it on March 22, 1793. The Calcutta Supreme Council passed the measure on May 1st as Regulation I. This and the following regulations became known as the Cornwallis Code after the Governor General . Sir John Shore and Charles Grant had spoken out against a permanent appraisal until the land had been properly surveyed. You have been outvoted.
The Zamindare , a class of tax collectors that already existed under the Mughals, were recognized as the de facto owners of the land on which they were responsible for collecting property taxes and could now be expropriated if they defaulted. Initially, this tax farmer privilege was to be auctioned off every 10 years. However, the position of the Zamindare soon became hereditary again, to the detriment of those who cultivated the land. Speculators residing in Calcutta were often able to acquire expropriated land. They also controlled all communal land in their area. The Zamindar of Burdwan was at times the Empire's largest taxpayer.
The system became the basis of the British indirect management system in India in the years that followed. Due to the fact that the Zamindare are now private owners of the land, similar to the British landed nobility ( gentry ) z. B. in Ireland, they could arbitrarily squeeze taxes out of their "subjects". Already Karl Marx realized that this was only a poor caricature of the landed gentry and an absurd economic experiment. Blackmailed surpluses remained with the zamindars. In Bengal, government revenues doubled, but the burden on farmers and tenants increased sevenfold within three decades. The landowners could now, under the protection of the British judiciary, have traditional defaulting farmers evicted from their land through foreclosure. The peasants or tenants, whose rights, and especially their duties, were first established by Regulation VII of 1819, were often forced to incur debts with moneylenders at exorbitant interest in order to raise the taxes. Especially at the time of droughts, which occur regularly due to the failing monsoons , zamindars and moneylenders increased their land holdings, as taxes were only rarely waived. At the same time, the social structure of the villages was destroyed in the long term. Protests against the tax burden were the leading cause of uprisings and revolts against British rule in India and required the establishment of an efficient police apparatus, the costs of which were in turn imposed on the villages.
The Indian National Congress called for a reform of the basic taxation as early as 1900. The Zamindar system of tax tenants was only abolished by the Land Sealing Act after independence, but expropriations as part of land reform were limited. Vinoba Bhave achieved some redistribution of arable land with his Bhudan movement in the 1950s. The consequences of Permanent Settlement are still visible today as the rural regions of West Bengal and Bihar , where the system ruled, are among the poorest in India.
literature
- Ranajit Guha ; A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement , New Delhi, 1982
- Sirajul Islam; The Permanent Settlement in Bengal: A Study of its Operation 1790-1819 , Dhaka, 1979
swell
- ↑ Overview in multiple volumes: Baden-Powell, BH; Land Systems of British India
- ↑ Capital, Vol III, Moscow 1971, pp. 333f.
- ^ British India # Public Finances
- ↑ 1790-3 Introduction of a Western-style judicial system, but Indians were excluded from the upper levels. An Advanced History of India; London 1950, pp. 797f.
- ^ Advanced History (1950), p. 799.
- ↑ which also included taxes for schools and road construction (3½% from 1871). Majumdar, RC (Ed.); British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance, Part I; Bombay 1963, p.821; Overview: chap. XXXVII "Land Revenue Policy"