Who introduced the permanent settlement in Bengal ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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 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) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2025 Q119 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q119 — History PYQ with Answer