Land Rent

Rent:

Blackstone defines the word "rent": 

"The word rent, or render, reditus, signifies a compensation or return, it being in the nature of an acknowledgment given for the possession of some corporeal hereditament. 

It is defined to be a certain profit issuing yearly out of lands and tenements corporeal. 

It must be a profit, but there is no occasion for it to be, as it usually is, a sum of money for spurs, capons, horses, corn, or other matters, may be rendered by way of rent. 

It may also consist in services or manual operations, as to plough so many acres of ground, to attend the king or the lord to the wars, or the like, which services in the eye of the law are profits."

The word "rent," which has found its way into the two enactments from the old Regulations of the East India Company, is used probably "as the equivalent of the Hindustani words lagan or poth, which are well understood in the country as representing the compensation receivable by the landlord for letting the land to a kashtkar or cultivator.

It is equally well known that such compensation, ever same the reign of the Emperor Akbar, when his Revenue Minister, Raja Todar Mal, introduced his system, payments of lagan were made in three ways. 

The first of these was batai or division of the produce in kind, of which the zamindar or where such rights, did not exist, the Government, took a certain proportion. 

When cash payments were introduced instead of batai, one method was to make an estimate or appraisement of the crops, and to take in cash what would represent the due proportion as the lagan. 

The third method was cash payments of fixed lagan agreed upon jay the kashtkar, and irrespective of the nature, quality or quantity of the produce. 

This last was perhaps the most recent outcome of Maharaja Todar Mal's powerful administrative intellect, and this is the system which has received encouragement all over India under the British rule.

But neither the old Regulations nor our, present Land Revenue and Rent Acts force the zamindar to adopt the system of pure cash payments in preference to the other two methods.

The lands held under any other system, that is to say, lands granted either for past or continuing services, or for personal merit or worth (as in the case of religious or Charitable grants), which involved no rent in any of the three forms above described, were all known under the generic name of muafi or "rent free"--a term having many sub-divisions (such as shankalap, etc.), and one of them is well known as chakran or chakri, that is, service tenure, to which Section 41, Regulation VIII of 1793, related, rendering them liable to redemption and assessment. 

All these were regarded as "rent-free," simply because they were not subject to anything which could be called "rent," whatever the origin, the motive, the object or the conditions of the grant, may have been.