About four and a half million people came into East Punjab in 1947 and 1948 and about the same number left it. The refugees who came were largely from the canal colonies and the western districts, and most had been cultivators.
The land settlement that followed was one of the largest administrative operations ever attempted in India. Claims were filed for land left behind, verified against Pakistani revenue records where those could be obtained, and matched against evacuee land available in the east.
Because the land left behind in the colonies was better and more plentiful than the land available in the east, a graded cut was applied: the larger the holding claimed, the larger the proportion lost. Tarlok Singh, the officer who designed the scheme, published the method.
It was completed within about five years and is generally regarded as having worked. There was no comparable success in resettling urban refugees or the landless.
The refugee generation rebuilt in Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Amritsar, and the industrial character of those cities, hosiery, machine tools, sports goods, bicycle parts, is largely their doing.
Claims were filed in camps and tahsil offices on printed forms by people who had walked out with nothing. What was accepted as proof was the claimant's statement, the corroboration of others from the same village, and where it could be got, the revenue record from the other side. Whole villages arrived together and vouched for each other.
The standard acre was the instrument that made it work. Land of different quality was converted into a common unit so that a claim in the Lyallpur colony could be settled against land at Karnal or Ferozepur, and that conversion table turned the whole business from an argument into arithmetic.
Tarlok Singh wrote the scheme up afterward and the account is in print. It is the only land redistribution of that size in South Asia for which the man who designed it published his method, and the book is out of print and almost never cited.