The law gave tenants a choice of registering with the government and
stipulated that tenants who had registered could not be evicted from the land they
sharecropped as long as they paid the landlord a minimum share-rent of 25 percent of
output. Thus for most tenants, the reform increased their share of output on sharecropped
land from 50 percent to 75 percent. And it gave them permanent, inheritable tenure on the
land they sharecropped. In the decade after the reform, West Bengal achieved a
breakthrough in agricultural productivity growth