Published Sep 10, 2026 | 7:05 PM ⚊ Updated Sep 10, 2026 | 7:05 PM
Image used for representational purpose. (AI generated)
Synopsis: Most tenant farmers — kaulu raithulu — are invisible as far as the government is concerned. But then a government that can find its “farmers” for a loan waiver or an input subsidy announcement cannot credibly say it has no way of finding the family that actually planted the crop.
Every crop season, a very large number of families across Telangana walk onto fields that are not theirs, sign no paper, and grow the food that reaches our markets. They are tenant farmers — kaulu raithulu — and by law, by policy, and by the State’s own records, most of them do not exist.
This is not a bureaucratic oversight. It is the direct, if unintended, result of a decade of well-meaning reform that fixed everything except the one problem tenant farmers actually have: no landowner will put their name on paper.
Protective tenancy law was designed to give the cultivator security. In practice, it has done the opposite.
Under the old undivided Andhra Pradesh Tenancy Act of 1956, a tenant who cultivated the same land for twelve years continuously earned a right of first refusal and, eventually, ownership. No landowner wants to sign that risk away, so no landowner signed anything.
The 2019 Crop Cultivator Rights Act dropped the twelve-year ownership clause, but the fear it created has outlived the law. Landowners still refuse written agreements, tenants still fear that asking for one will cost them the lease itself, and the result is the same: no agreement, no Loan Eligibility Card, no scheme, no credit, no insurance, no name in any register anywhere.
The numbers tell the story better than any policy note. Nationally, leased-in land fell to about 6.6% after independence-era tenancy reform, then climbed back to 10.4% after liberalisation. In undivided Andhra Pradesh, tenancy touched 35.7% of cultivated land.
Yet roughly 80% of India’s farmer suicides are by tenant farmers. They receive about 3% of all agricultural credit. They are all but shut out of crop insurance, input subsidy, and every loan waiver announced with fanfare for “farmers.”
Telangana’s own Dharani land-records system quietly removed the kāstu (cultivator-possession) column that once gave tenants a toehold in the record — and Rythu Bandhu, paid to landowners regardless of who actually farms the land, has made landowners even less willing to admit a tenant exists on their plot at all.
But recognition, once it happens, has to be built carefully — because a “tenant farmer” today covers two very different realities, and a policy that treats them alike will fail the ones who need it most.
At one end is the small or marginal tenant: a resident family, leasing a modest and often fragmented parcel close to home, staking its entire livelihood on that land year after year. Such a family’s interest is identical to the landowner’s own long-term interest — healthy soil, a stable relationship, a crop next season too.
At the other end is a newer, commercial phenomenon: large operators who lease extensive, non-contiguous tracts across several villages or districts, often for a single season, with no attachment to the land beyond that season’s yield. Because their return is measured over the life of one short lease, the incentive runs entirely the wrong way — pour in fertiliser and pesticide to maximise this year’s output, and move to the next village when the soil gives out. They are not vulnerable; they are, in effect, fly-in, fly-out operators, extracting value and leaving landowners and communities to live with exhausted, chemically-saturated soil for years afterwards.
A recognition scheme that hands the same identity card and the same subsidy to both will do real damage: it will spend scarce welfare money on operators who need none of it, while leaving the soil-degradation problem they cause completely unregulated.
Also Read | Out of sight, out of schemes: The invisible tenant farmers of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh
None of this requires a new Act, a new committee, or another round of the same reform that has failed twice already. It requires a register that does not depend on landowner cooperation, and a policy imagination that treats “tenant farmer” as a household to protect, not a punishment to fear.
Telangana’s Gram Sabhas can enumerate cultivating families village by village without recording land or survey details that unsettle any tenancy. A Tenant Livelihood Identity Card, delinked from any specific plot, can certify a household’s livelihood status without asserting any claim on land — surviving a change of landlord or lease the way a ration card survives a change of address. Within that register, small and marginal resident tenants — verified by extent leased, years of cultivation, and dependence on that land — should get the Direct Benefit Transfer, credit, and insurance; large commercial operators should instead face mandatory lease registration, soil health testing at the start and end of every lease, and enforced limits on chemical input, with fallow periods where degradation is found.
Two further steps would close the loop. First, a State-level penalty: a landowner who draws cultivator-linked subsidies while someone else works the land should face recovery or curtailment of benefits once a verified complaint is filed — removing the incentive to hide tenancy in the first place. Second, a Central push: PM-KISAN Samman Nidhi, currently paid to landowners regardless of who farms, should be extended to verified tenant cultivators, with Telangana’s own recognition mechanism offered as the template the Centre can adopt.
Land increasingly belongs to people who do not farm it. Whether that land keeps producing food depends entirely on the people who lease it and work it — and that population is growing, not shrinking, as tenancy climbs back toward pre-reform levels. A government that can find its “farmers” for a loan waiver or an input subsidy announcement cannot credibly say it has no way of finding the family that actually planted the crop.
Recognition does not require landowners to lose anything. It requires the State to stop asking tenant farmers to prove their existence through a document their own landlords will never sign — and to make sure that when help finally arrives, it reaches the family that needs it, not the operator passing through.
Also Read:
Telangana’s tenant farmers and society’s duty!
Tenant farmers in Telangana struggle amid soaring lease costs, policy gaps: Survey
The silent anti-incumbency building in rural Andhra
