The Land Reforms Act of India (1955) and its subsequent amendments stated that all sharecroppers would have permanent use rights on land that they had lease and that such rights would be inheritable. Such incumbency rights could be claimed as long as sharecroppers paid the legal share of the crop to their landlords or did not leave the land uncultivated or unless the landlords wished to take back the land for personal cultivation.

However, landlords routinely used the personal cultivation clause to evict tenants. There was another major barrier. A tenant would have to formally register his status (as a tenant) with the government. But few tenants registered, faced as they were with potential intimidation from their landlords, the removal of other forms of support such as consumption credit, and the prospect of a long and arduous legal battle if they truly wanted to dispute an eviction.[2] Given this imbalance, landlords regularly exploited their tenants, either evicting them just before the harvest season, or giving them a lower share of the produce then they were entitled to, or refusing to give loans or charging.

extremely high rates of interest on loans taken for agricultural investments by the bargadar.[3]

Enumeration of the sharecroppers and legal recording of their tenancy would have provided them with protection from eviction and exploitation under the existing laws itself. However, most bargadars did not know their rights under these laws, and, given their financial status, they were financially dependent on their landlords. Additionally, the long and tedious recording process, and the fear of reprisals by the landlords meant that most bargadars did not record their names. Recording drives before Operation Barga had managed to record only 400,000, out of the estimated total of 2.2-2.5 million bargadars.