Indian Punjab wipes the floor with Pakistani Punjab

West and East Punjab agriculture — a comparison —Ishtiaq Ahmed

I want to probe below why the Indian Punjab has done far better than the Pakistani Punjab in the agricultural sector. The yield per hectare in all essential crops: wheat, rice, sugarcane, maize, gram is far greater in East Punjab as compared to West Punjab and only cotton produce in West Punjab comes close to that of East Punjab (Shinder S Thandi, International Journal of Punjab Studies, January-June 1997). The result has been that the Indian Punjab has the highest standard of living in India and I could easily see that the villages there were far more prosperous than those in Pakistan. This is totally puzzling if one reviews the recent economic history of the undivided Punjab in perspective.

As a West Punjab Pakistani, I, therefore, expected to find the eastern half not only smaller but also ‘junior’ in some sense. After all West Punjab with its total area of 205,345 square kilometres (28.5 per cent of Pakistan) is population-wise the biggest province of Pakistan. Its 72,585,000 people constitute the biggest nationality: 48 to 61 percent, depending on whether or not you include Seraiki speakers among Punjabis. Its economic and political domination is resented by the other provinces. The most powerful institution in the country, the army, is solidly Punjabi. So is the senior civil bureaucracy. In sharp contrast, East Punjab is only 50,362 sq km (1.54 per cent of Indian territory) and its 24,289,000 people are only 2.5 per cent of the Indian population. Although Punjabi Sikhs are over-represented in the Indian army (7 to 8 per cent despite their less than 2 per cent share in the Indian population) they are not a dominant group politically. Moreover, 15 years of violent conflict between the Khalistanis and the Indian state (1974-1992) claimed some 60,000 lives and caused massive collateral damage to property and production.

What explains then East Punjab’s agricultural success? I talked to MS Gill, the former chief election commissioner of India and now a member of the upper house of the Indian parliament, the Rajya Sabha. He served as a senior policymaker on the agricultural sector for the Indian government and had done considerable research on this subject. He explained that a number of factors converged to bring about the great changes in East Punjab. At the centre of the transformation was indeed the Sikh peasant cultivator, often the Jat, whose courage, perseverance, spirit of enterprise and muscle prowess proved crucial. But even more important had been structural changes such as a radical land reform and co-operative farming. Big landlordism had been nearly eliminated and instead a sturdy class of independent peasants come about. The ceiling on landholding was fixed around 20 acres. Government support in the form of various subsidies and promotion of co-operative farming enabled several farmers to pool their resources and together buy a tractor and other related machinery. Additionally, government banks provided easy loans and the implementation processes had been really firm.

I found Mr Gill’s explanation very convincing. The landlord class in West Punjab benefited most when Pakistan came into being, although some progressive Muslim Leaguers wanted to bring about radical land reforms. The land reform of 1959 fixed the ceiling at 500 acres of irrigated land and 1,000 acres of un-irrigated lands; ZA Bhutto carried out a number of land reforms in the 1970s but the ceiling remained high: 100 acres. Moreover, pre-capitalist production relations such as absentee landlordism continued to prevail in the Pakistani Punjab. The Pakistan Army, instead of being an agent of modernisation, has itself been partisan on the land question and some of its high-handed policies against tenant-cultivators on the Okara military farms were recently in news.