Agrarian reform and land markets: A study of land transactions in two villages of West Bengal, 1977-1995

There are a number of studies on the achievements of land reforms by the state with respect to redistribution of land and registration of sharecroppers under Operation Barga in West Bengal? There is no study, however, that attempts to analyze the extent of land redistribution by taking into account the effect of land reforms on land markets. In this article I have attempted to analyze the effects of agrarian reform on land markets and on the pattern of transactions in land markets. (Land market refers to transactions in which the ownership of land was transferred; landlease markets are not included in the analysis). The article is organized as follows: In Section IIl describe the study area and the data that I used, in Section Ill I discuss the volume of land transactions in the study villages, and in Section IV I present a profile of buyers and sellers in the markets and discuss the pattern of transactions in land markets. Section V presents some conclusions of the analysis.