Land Use Categories in India: 9-Fold Classification

NCERT India: People and Economy — Unit III, Chapter 3, Part 1

Land — A Multi-Use Resource

Look around you. The space your school stands on, the road that brought you here, the park where you played in the morning, the field beside your village where wheat is ripening, and the pasture where village cattle graze — each of these is a different way in which human beings put land to use. The same surface of the earth therefore serves as a base for production, for residence and for recreation. This is what makes land an extraordinary resource: it is fixed in extent, but its uses are remarkably varied.

India, being a land-scarce yet population-rich country, has had to manage every hectare with care. The records of how its land is being used are kept by the Land Revenue Department in each state. To understand these records — and to read the official statistics that the Government of India publishes year after year — we first need to clarify two important terms that often appear together: geographical area and reporting area.

Reporting Area vs Geographical Area

Land use categories, when added up, give the reporting area^?. This figure is somewhat different from the geographical area^? of the country. The Survey of India is the agency responsible for measuring the geographical area of administrative units in India.

The crucial distinction between the two is this: the reporting area may change from year to year because it depends on the estimates contained in the land revenue records of the various states. The geographical area, by contrast, is fixed by the official Survey of India measurements and does not change. So when the same village or district appears under slightly different totals in two different years, it is generally the reporting area that has been adjusted, not the actual size of the territory.

The Nine Land Use Categories in Land Revenue Records

The Land Revenue Records of India classify land into the following nine standard categories. Together they are designed to cover every parcel of land that has been surveyed.

1. Forests

It is important to note that the area under actual forest cover is different from the area classified as forest. The latter is the area that the Government has identified and demarcated for forest growth. The land revenue records use this second, official definition. As a result, this category may show an increase even when the actual extent of trees on the ground has not increased.

2. Barren and Wastelands

This category includes land that cannot be brought under cultivation with the available technology — barren hilly terrains, ravines, and the desert lands of western Rajasthan are typical examples. Reclaiming such land is either prohibitively expensive or technologically out of reach.

3. Land Put to Non-Agricultural Uses

Land under settlements (rural and urban), infrastructure (roads, canals, railways), industries, shops, schools and similar uses falls in this category. As the secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy expand, this is the category that grows most rapidly. The mall on the city's outskirts and the new industrial estate on the highway both add to this share.

4. Area under Permanent Pastures and Grazing Lands

Most of this land is owned by the village panchayat or by the Government; only a small proportion is privately owned. The portion held by the panchayat constitutes the village's Common Property Resources^? — community grazing grounds shared by every household.

5. Area under Miscellaneous Tree Crops & Groves (Not in Net Sown Area)

Land under orchards, fruit trees and groves of trees grown for the timber, fodder or shade they yield. Much of this land is privately owned. It is important to remember that this category is excluded from the net sown area, even though the trees themselves are a kind of crop.

6. Culturable Wasteland

Any land that has been left fallow for more than five years falls into this group. It is, in principle, capable of being brought under cultivation again, provided suitable reclamation practices — deep ploughing, removal of weeds, soil-improvement, levelling — are applied.

7. Current Fallow

Land that is left without cultivation for one agricultural year or less. Fallowing is a deliberate cultural practice: it gives the land rest, allowing soil fertility to be restored through natural processes such as nitrogen fixation by leguminous weeds.

8. Fallow Other than Current Fallow

Cultivable land left uncultivated for more than one year but less than five years. If the same parcel is left untilled for more than five years, it would be reclassified as culturable wasteland.

9. Net Area Sown

The physical extent of land on which crops are sown and harvested in a given year. This is the central category for understanding India's agricultural geography — and it has stayed close to 46 per cent of the reporting area in recent decades.

Land Use Changes in India, 1950–51 to 2021–22

Land use in any region is shaped, to a large extent, by the nature of economic activities being carried out there. But while economic activities change quickly over time, land — like other natural resources — is fixed in area. To understand how India's land use has shifted, we need to recognise three kinds of structural change that the economy has gone through.

Two crucial points must be remembered before reading any figure on changing land use:

1. The percentages are computed against the reporting area, not the geographical area.
2. The reporting area itself has stayed roughly constant, so a decline in one category usually corresponds to an increase in another.

Categories that Have Increased

Five land use categories have shown an increase between 1950–51 and 2019–20:

1. Non-agricultural use — the highest rate of increase, driven by the changing structure of the Indian economy: rapid growth of industry and services, expansion of related infrastructure, and the steady spread of both rural and urban settlements. The area under non-agricultural uses is therefore growing at the expense of wastelands and agricultural land alike.
2. Forests — the rise reflects an increase in the demarcated forest area, not necessarily an increase in actual tree cover.
3. Current fallow — the trend fluctuates greatly from year to year depending on rainfall and cropping cycles, so the increase is hard to read from just two data points.
4. Net area sown — a recent rise driven mainly by bringing culturable wasteland under the plough. Earlier, this category had shown a slow decline because of expansion of non-agricultural use (think of buildings spreading on farmland in your own city or village).
5. Permanent pastures and grazing lands — a marginal increase.

Categories that Have Declined

Four categories have registered a decline:

1. Barren and wasteland and culturable wasteland — declined as both agricultural and non-agricultural pressures pulled them into productive use.
2. Area under tree crops and groves — lost ground because of the same pressure from agricultural land.
3. Fallow other than current fallow — declined as multiple cropping reduced the period for which land could be left at rest.

Common Property Resources (CPRs)

Land, classified by ownership, falls under two broad heads — private land and common property resources. The former is owned by an individual or a group of individuals; the latter is owned by the state for the use of the community as a whole.

CPRs play a quiet but vital role in rural life. They provide:

• Fodder for the livestock,
• Fuel (firewood) for households,
• Minor forest products such as fruits, nuts, fibre and medicinal plants.

For landless families and marginal farmers, CPRs are often the only resource that supports their livestock-based incomes — especially since these households have little or no private land of their own to graze. CPRs are equally important for women, who in rural India are usually responsible for collecting fodder and fuel and now have to spend long hours doing so as the CPRs around the village have become degraded.