NEW DELHI-Land Reform Concealing the Surplus

NEW DELHI Land Reform: Concealing the Surplus B M THERE has been a spate of directives during the last couple of months for expediting the implementation of land reforms, which in official reckoning is identified with the enforcement of land ceiling laws. Representatives of the Union Agriculture Ministry, which has administrative responsibilities for land reforms, are fond of stressng that the ministry is pushing the case for land reforms with much greater vigour than ever before in the past and that the widespread impression that the govern- ment is lukewarm about land reforms under the influence of the so-called rich peasant lobby is completely wrong. In support of this claim, ministry sources point out that the Standing Committee on land reforms, which had not met for the last seven years, has been activised and the state governments, especially that of Andhra Pradesh where the position in this regard is particularly bad, are being pressed to distribute expeditiously land declared as surplus.