Land Reform versus Inequality in Nadur Village, Kerala

Kerala's 1969 land reform law abolished tenancy in both rice land and house compound plots. Using a household survey in the central Kerala village of Nadur from 1971 (just before the reform was implemented), this paper examines the reform's effects by 1987 on a restudy of 170 households. Among the major consequences of the reform are: abolition of landlord and tenant classes, reduction in land ownership and income inequality as measured by the Gini index, and reduction in caste inequality as measured by comparisons of averages and selected correlations between land ownership and income. Individual household examples supplement the statistical findings to illustrate how the land reform has interacted with other features of Kerala's economy to produce upward or downward mobility within the sample population.