Land Reforms in Pakistan A Historical Perspective

The socially divisive land-tenure system which Pakistan inherited and which, because of its inherent inequities, drives a wedge between a landlord and his tenant has been the subject of much concern and repeated studies by the country’s policy-makers. The inequities of the land-tenure system were the results of the high degree of land concentration, absentee landlordism, insecurity of tenure for share-croppers, and the extraction of excessive surplus as rent through batai, abwab and begar labour that prevailed at the time of Pakistan’s independence in 1947.