Chaudhary Charan Singh

ABOUT CHAUDHARY CHARAN SINGH

Charan Singh was born on 23 December 1902 in a rural peasant Jat family of village Noorpur, District Hapur (Erstwhile District Meerut), Uttar Pradesh (Erstwhile United Provinces of Agra and Oudh). Charan Singh entered politics as part of the Independence Movement motivated by Mohandas Gandhi. He was active from 1931 in the Ghaziabad District Arya Samaj as well as the Meerut District Indian National Congress for which he was jailed twice by the British. Before independence, as a member of Legislative Assembly of the United Provinces elected in 1937, he took a deep interest in the laws that were detrimental to the village economy and he slowly built his ideological and practical stand against the exploitation of tillers of the land by landlords.

Chaudhary Charan Singh vision for social equity, and his ability to create political consensus on issues, resulted in important pieces of legislation in the State Assembly. Some of the notable achievements were the Debt Redemption Bill, 1939, The Consolidation of Holdings Act of 1953, and the Uttar Pradesh Zamindari and land Reforms Act, 1952, which resulted in the abolition of the Zamindari system throughout the State. The land reforms in the state empowered the tillers, provided the landless with ownership of land and thus created the enabling environment for their social and economic upliftment. The Agricultural Produce Marketing Bill, which he introduced in the assembly in 1938, was passed in 1964, and helped improve the market linkages for the farmers. The consecutive years of drought in 1966-1967 led the Central government to consider procuring food grains directly from farmers at prices, which would have been highly unfavorable to them. Chaudhary Charan Singh modified the central government plan to the advantage of agriculturalists by offering them a much higher procurement price than the prevailing market rates. The infrastructure he put in place for this led in time to the Minimum Support Price mechanism, which has today become an integral part of government interventions to provide pricing stability to the agricultural producers.