# The Permanent Settlement
**स्थायी बंदोबस्त**

- Canonical page: https://indianepics.online/event/permanent-settlement-1793/
- Chapter: [Company rule](https://indianepics.online/chapter/company.md)
- Track: evidence (archaeology and documents)
- When: 1793 CE
- Where: Calcutta, Bengal (22.572, 88.364)
- Tags: colonial, political

## Summary

Cornwallis fixes Bengal's land revenue in perpetuity and makes the zamindars owners of the land, whose estates are sold if they fall behind.

कॉर्नवालिस ने बंगाल का भू-राजस्व सदा के लिए तय किया और ज़मींदारों को भूमि का स्वामी बनाया; बकाया होने पर उनकी ज़मींदारी नीलाम होती थी।

## Account

Proclaimed on 22 March 1793 and enacted as Regulation I of that year, the settlement fixed the land revenue of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa for ever at the level of the decennial assessment of 1789-90, and recognised the zamindars who paid it as proprietors of the soil. An estate that missed a payment could be auctioned, and in the next two decades a large share of the old zamindaris changed hands.

The Company wanted a predictable revenue and a loyal landed class, and got both, at the expense of the cultivators, whose rights the settlement barely defined. Later British provinces chose differently: Madras and Bombay mostly settled directly with peasants under the ryotwari system, and the north-west with village communities.

Whether the settlement helped or held back Bengal's agriculture has been argued since the Fifth Report of 1812. Ranajit Guha traced its ideas to Philip Francis and the French physiocrats.

## Sources

- The Fifth Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, 1812 (Firminger ed., 1917), vol. I — https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.206958
- Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal (1963)

## Image

Charles Cornwallis, 1st Marquess Cornwallis. Thomas Gainsborough, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ALord_Cornwallis.jpg

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