Her Own Land

Context: Gender equal land rights remain a distant goal 75 years after Independence.

Gender Inequality in land rights: 65 years after the passing of the Hindu Succession Act (HSA), 1956, and 15 years after the enactment of the Hindu Succession Amendment Act (HSAA), 2005, land rights of women are still not granted to the fullest.

• Inequalities that remained after HSA, 1956: 

• First, the inheritance of agricultural land devolved according to land reform laws which were highly gendered unequal, especially in six northern states. 
• Second, daughters were excluded from coparcenary rights in the joint family property.
• Inter-gender gaps: Using ICRISAT’s longitudinal data (2009-2014) for nine states, the following observations were gathered.
• Despite significant advancement in inheritance laws, women were found to own land in only 16 % of the sampled 1,114 rural landowning households, and just 8.4 % of all females owned land, averaged across states. 
• Overall, women constituted barely 14 % of all landowners and owned only 11 % of the land, with an average area of 1.24 ha relative to 1.66 ha for men. 

• Intra-gender gaps: Although legal amendments have expanded daughters’ rights, socially widow’s rights have always carried greater legitimacy since the time of the Dharmashastras.

• Most of the landowning women had acquired land through their marital families, typically as widows and not as daughters through parents, despite the legal strengthening of daughters’ rights since Independence.
• Even women who own land receive it too late in life to notably improve their well-being or bargaining power in families.
• Inter-state differences: Female landowners constituted 32 % of all landowners in Telangana but only 6 % in Odisha.

Progress towards gender-neutral land rights:

• In 1976, Kerala abolished joint property altogether, while between 1986 and 1994, four states (Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra) amended the HSA to recognise unmarried daughters as coparceners.
• The HSAA 2005 brought about gender equality in law on both counts across all states.

Way Forward:

• Change in the rigid social attitude: Only laws cannot guarantee land rights for women; for e.g. in Maharashtra, which made amendment in 1994, only 11 % of landowners are female. 
• Fathers fear losing control over land if given to married daughters. Daughters fear damaging family relations if they claim their shares. Policymakers say they fear land fragmentation. 
• But relations based on gross inequality are already damaged. And ownership need not cause fragmentation if plots are still cultivated together by families, as is common in northwest India.

• Need more gender-disaggregated data on land ownership and innovative policies to increase women’s actual ownership.
• New ideas deserve attention, such as joint ownership and group cultivation (which can bring scale economies). 
• Group farming by women is already practised in several states, including Kerala, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Bihar and West Bengal. The idea of group ownership still awaits attention.