BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 119 of 142

Correct — C, Lord Cornwallis. The Permanent Settlement was concluded in 1793 by the Company administration headed by Charles, Earl Cornwallis, and formed part of the larger body of legislation later called the Cornwallis Code. Its central act was to recognise the zamindars as proprietors of the land and to fix the government's revenue demand on them in perpetuity — the demand would never be raised again, whatever the estate came to yield. The reasoning behind it was explicitly developmental, and Cornwallis put it plainly: 'when the demand of government is fixed, an opportunity is afforded to the landholder of increasing his profits, by the improvement of his lands.' The Company had first tried a ten-year settlement in 1790, and it was that decennial arrangement that was declared permanent three years later. It applied to Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and also to Varanasi and the northern districts of the Madras Presidency, and it did not arrive unopposed inside the administration — Cornwallis and Sir John Shore argued the question out between 1786 and 1790, Shore doubting that the zamindars would trust a promise of permanence. The consequences ran for a century and a half: a landlord class with a saleable, heritable title, cultivators reduced to tenants with no security, and a state revenue that stayed frozen while prices rose. Because (c) is right, option (d) 'None of the above' fails.

• (a)Warren Hastings — Hastings was the Governor-General who preceded this settlement and experimented in the opposite direction — farming out the right to collect revenue for fixed terms, first on a five-yearly basis from 1772 and later year by year. Those were auctions of the collection right, not a grant of proprietorship, and their instability is part of why a permanent arrangement was sought.
• (b)Holt Mackengie — Holt Mackenzie belongs to a different system and a different province: he introduced the Mahalwari settlement in 1822, given legal effect by Regulation VII of 1822, under which revenue was settled with the mahal — a village or group of villages — through its lambardars, rather than with an individual landlord. The name is genuinely from land-revenue history, which is what makes the option work.
• (d)None of the above — This escape option requires all three names to be wrong, and the third is right. An escape option is correct only when every named option can be shown to fail, and that cannot be shown here.

The colonial land-revenue map of India has three systems, and every question in this area is testing whether you can attach each to its author, its area and its unit of settlement. The Permanent Settlement, made by Cornwallis in 1793, settled the revenue with zamindars in Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Varanasi and part of the Madras Presidency, and fixed the demand for ever. The Ryotwari system, associated with Alexander Read and Thomas Munro in Madras and later extended to Bombay, settled directly with the individual cultivator, who received a patta from the government and paid it directly, with the assessment revised periodically after survey. The Mahalwari system, introduced by Holt Mackenzie in 1822 in the North-Western Provinces and later applied in Punjab, settled with the village community jointly through its headmen. Each choice had a theory behind it — an improving landlord, a secure peasant proprietor, a self-governing village — and each produced a different rural society, which is why the Permanent Settlement's zamindars remained a political force in Bihar and Bengal into the twentieth century.

Learn the three systems as a table with four columns — system, author, region, unit of settlement — and most option sets collapse immediately, because the distractors are always drawn from the other rows of that table. This question is a clean example: Hastings is the wrong period, Mackenzie is the wrong system and the wrong province, and only Cornwallis matches. The Bihar relevance is direct and worth holding, because the Commission returns to it: the Permanent Settlement covered Bihar as well as Bengal, so the zamindari structure it created is the background to Bihar's agrarian politics, from the Champaran indigo grievances to the Kisan Sabha under Swami Sahajanand Saraswati and the bakasht land disputes of the late 1930s, and finally to the Bihar Land Reforms Act of the early 1950s that abolished the intermediaries. A date-and-name question here is really the doorway to a century and a half of the state's history.

• The Permanent Settlement was concluded in 1793 by the administration of Charles, Earl Cornwallis, and formed part of the Cornwallis Code; a ten-year settlement made in 1790 was declared permanent in 1793
• It recognised zamindars as proprietors and fixed the state's revenue demand in perpetuity; Cornwallis justified it on the ground that a fixed demand would make landholders invest in improving their land
• It applied to Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and also to Varanasi and the northern districts of the Madras Presidency
• Cornwallis and Sir John Shore debated the proposal between 1786 and 1790, Shore doubting that zamindars would trust a permanent promise
• Holt Mackenzie introduced the Mahalwari system in 1822, given effect by Regulation VII of 1822, settling revenue with the mahal — a village or group of villages
• Warren Hastings had earlier farmed out revenue collection for fixed terms, on a five-yearly basis from 1772 and later annually

• Attaching the Permanent Settlement to Warren Hastings because his revenue experiments came first; farming out collection is not the same as settling proprietorship
• Treating the Permanent Settlement as a Bengal-only measure — it covered Bihar and Orissa too, which is why it matters for this exam
• Reaching for 'None of the above' when one of the named options is plainly correct

BPSC asks who introduced which system, in one line, with the authors of the other systems supplied as decoys. UPSC asks the mechanics and consequences — why zamindars failed to issue pattas, whether default meant loss of the estate, how the three systems differed in their unit of settlement — so the same table has to carry the operating rules of each system, not just its author.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Mahalwari system of land revenue settlement was associated with

  • (a)Lord Cornwallis in Bengal
  • (b)Thomas Munro in Madras
  • (c)Holt Mackenzie in the North-Western Provinces
  • (d)Warren Hastings in Bihar

  Answer(c) Holt Mackenzie in the North-Western Provinces — introduced in 1822 and given legal effect by Regulation VII of 1822, settling revenue with the village or mahal.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under the Permanent Settlement of 1793, the revenue demand of the government was

  • (a)revised every ten years after survey
  • (b)fixed in perpetuity on the zamindars
  • (c)collected directly from each cultivator
  • (d)settled jointly with the village community

  Answer(b) fixed in perpetuity on the zamindars — periodic revision after survey describes the Ryotwari system and joint village settlement describes Mahalwari.