How did the Right to Property come to be a Fundamental Right in the Constitution of India?

By the end of British rule, zamindars held vast tracts of land and complete control over tillers’ rights. Historical patterns of alienation, first under the Mughals and later under the British, had fragmented this land heavily. In the run-up to independence in 1947, socialism dominated the thinking of the Indian National Congress, the party that dominated the Constituent Assembly drafting India’s new constitution.

Insecure land tenures, rural poverty and indebtedness, and recurring famine preoccupied the Constituent Assembly throughout its deliberations. Members split sharply over whether the government should take over private property outright, or leave property rights as the Government of India Act, 1935, had defined them. Even members who favoured expropriation rarely opposed abolishing the zamindari system itself. Their disagreements centred instead on how much compensation the state owed to those who lost land. The Constitution that India adopted in 1950 reflected that compromise: citizens gained the fundamental right “to acquire, hold and dispose of property” under Article 19(1)(f), while Article 19(5) subjected that right to reasonable restrictions in the public interest.

Article 31, the eminent domain article, could override this fundamental right to property. The state could still only seize private property by force “by the authority of law,” “for public purposes,” and on payment of compensation. The Constitution set no requirement that this compensation be “just,” only that the relevant law fix the amount directly or specify the principles for determining it.

The Constitution’s drafters aimed, above all, at social engineering through agrarian reform, and independent India’s land reform agenda rested on five components: abolishing intermediaries such as zamindars, reforming tenancy arrangements, capping the size of land holdings, consolidating fragmented holdings, and compiling and updating land records.

The Constitution places land under the “state list,” which lets state governments collect revenue and taxes on land and buildings and pass their own land reform laws, laws that abolish intermediary tenures, regulate holding sizes to enable ceiling-surplus redistribution to the landless, consolidate fragmented holdings, and settle disputed tenures and ownership. The Constitution placed “acquisition and requisitioning of property,” meaning eminent domain, on the concurrent list instead, which let both Parliament and state legislatures pass their own laws governing forcible land acquisition.