The history of Permanent Settlement in Bengal confirmed the theories of which British official?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → David Ricardo
Many British officials in India thought that the history of Bengal under the Permanent Settlement, where the zamindars seemed to have turned into rentiers, confirmed the theory of the economist David Ricardo.
Note: It seems that there is a mistake in the original NTA paper, which prints ‘British official’ when it should read ‘British economist’. David Ricardo was an economist, a celebrated figure in England by the 1820s, whose ideas colonial officials had learnt during their college years.
NCERT (2026-27): “3.2 A new revenue system … When officials devise policies, their thinking is deeply shaped by economic theories they are familiar with. By the 1820s, the economist David Ricardo was a celebrated figure in England. Colonial officials had learnt Ricardian ideas during their college years. In Maharashtra when British officials set about formulating the terms of the early settlement in the 1820s, they operated with some of these ideas. According to Ricardian ideas, a landowner should have a claim only to the ‘average rent’ that prevailed at a given time. When the land yielded more than this ‘average rent’, the landowner had a surplus that the state needed to tax. If tax was not levied, cultivators were likely to turn into rentiers, and their surplus income was unlikely to be productively invested in the improvement of the land. Many British officials in India thought that the history of Bengal confirmed Ricardo’s theory. There the zamindars seemed to have turned into rentiers, leasing out land and living on the rental incomes. It was therefore necessary, the British officials now felt, to have a different system.…” |