“The Ghosts Of ‘Operation Barga’ Are Still Haunting Bengal’s Land Reform“, Swarajya, 4 Sep 2026.

“On 7 August 2026, Subrata Gupta, advisor to West Bengal chief minister Suvendu Adhikari, said the state government was examining the legal position of bargadars who retained rights over land despite no longer farming it.

Removing those entries is not simple though. Operation Barga, the campaign that recorded Bengal’s sharecroppers and secured their tenancy, also made that tenancy very hard to end.

The entries stay on the record after the cultivator has died, migrated or stopped farming, and no settled procedure exists for taking them off.

A ‘barga’ is a legally recorded sharecropping right over land, while a ‘bargadar’ is the person who holds that right.

The system provides for de-facto dual ownership since a bargadar can have protected cultivation rights even though the land is owned by someone else. That right attaches to the plot rather than to any continuing act of cultivation. It is heritable, it cannot be transferred, and it cannot be surrendered without official verification………….”

Read the full article at Swarajya.