“Permanent settlement policy resulted in an unfair distribution of assessment, particularly when there was no survey.”

The Permanent Settlement of 1793, made by Cornwallis for Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, fixed the state demand on the zamindars in perpetuity, with roughly ten-elevenths of the rental going to government.

The statement is accurate about the method. No survey of area, soil quality or produce preceded it. The demand was fixed on the basis of the collections of previous years, themselves estimates inherited from the disordered decade after 1765 and shaped by whatever each zamindar had managed to pay or conceal. The result was an assessment unrelated to the actual productive capacity of the land.

The unfairness ran in both directions.

• Immediately, over-assessment. The demand was pitched high and made rigid, payable on a fixed day under the Sunset Law. Zamindars who could not pay were sold up, and a large proportion of Bengal's estates changed hands within two decades, often to Calcutta merchant purchasers.
• In the long run, under-assessment. As cultivation extended and prices rose through the nineteenth century, the frozen demand became a diminishing share of a growing rental. The state's share fell steadily while the zamindar's windfall grew — the standard fiscal criticism, made forcefully by Baden-Powell and by later officials who could not tax Bengal's agricultural wealth.
• Between districts, incidence varied arbitrarily, since the same absence of survey meant identical land bore very different burdens.

The party who paid. The settlement gave zamindars security but left the actual cultivator with none, since rent and tenure were not fixed at all — a gap only partly repaired by the Bengal Rent Act of 1859 and the Tenancy Act of 1885.