WUNRN
INDIA - GENDER & LAND TENURE
SECURITY
In
rural India, women do a majority of the agricultural labor, yet often have no
legal right or control over the land they farm. A new study conducted by
Landesa India for UN Women uncovered the barriers to women's land rights. A
report based on these findings provides recommendations to address these
challenges.
Direct Link to Full 28-Page Report:
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INDIA - WOMEN'S RIGHT TO INHERIT LAND
Dr. Ashok Sircar, India program director at Landesa, a global development nonprofit that
works to secure land rights for the world’s poor. Here, he analyzes the obstacles
preventing Indian women from exercising their right to inherit land and
discusses potential policy solutions.
From September through
December 2012, my colleagues and I searched three Indian states looking for 120
women in any district who had inherited farmland from their parents or their
husbands in the last eight years.
We wanted to interview
these women as part of a study to determine how they exercised their rights to
inherit land and what challenges they faced.
Apparently the challenges
were significant.
Even though we searched an
area with a population that included nearly one million rural women, we
couldn’t find 120 such women.
We looked in six districts
in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh. In one district we found five
women who had recently inherited their land; in another twenty. But we couldn’t
find enough to give us the sample size we needed for our study.
As my colleagues and I
searched the countryside, we saw no shortage of women laboring in the fields.
Indeed, across India women are hunched over the ground planting, weeding,
fertilizing, and harvesting in unprecedented numbers. Data across many states
makes clear that Indian women do more than half the agricultural labor. And in
orchards, cotton, and ground nut cultivation, they do the majority. More than
80 percent of rural women in India work in agriculture.
But they don’t own the land
they depend on.
This is not just a matter
of a piece of paper awarding them ownership rights. It is about power,
security, equality, and opportunity.
Without land titled in
their names, women have no proof of residency and can’t access institutional
credit, such as bank loans. They also can’t take advantage of agricultural
extension programs, such as government offers of subsidized seeds and fertilizers.
That women do not inherit
land impacts India’s ability to climb out of poverty. First, it is clear that
women lack access to the tools (credit) and programs (agricultural extension
services) they need to climb out of poverty. Second, as a wealth of research
indicates, when women have control over land, they direct more of their income
than do men toward their children’s education and nutrition.
This means that most rural
women across India inherit poverty not property generation after generation. As
a result, India is missing an opportunity.
My country’s constitution
promises women more than this. It says women are equal to men. India prides
itself on gender-sensitive legislation. In fact, in an effort to eliminate any
remaining doubt about women’s inheritance rights, the central government in
2005 passed an amendment to the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 that spelled out
that all Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and Jain women (who make up the vast majority
of women in India) have the same rights as their brothers to inherit
residential property and agricultural land.
However, as our research
indicates, these progressive laws have not helped ordinary Indian women—those
who live in rural areas and depend on the land to survive.
Currently, many women tell us they are not aware that they can legally
inherit land. A recent study by my organization (Landesa) and UN Women conducted in two
states found that only 22 percent of families surveyed knew about the 2005
amendment that gave women equal inheritance rights. And those women who know
they have a right to land say that powerful social customs prevent them from
asking for their share.
Women say that if they
assert their right to inherit land, they will cause conflict in their families.
Their brothers and extended family will see them as greedy. And should their
marriages fail or should they need to rely on their brothers for future help,
their pleas for assistance might be dismissed. This fear is so pervasive that
our earlier study found that almost half of all women said they didn’t want to
inherit land because they feared it would create bad feelings in the family and
community—even though it could help them climb out of poverty.
Not only is the progressive
2005 amendment not helping women, it appears as though it may actually be
hurting them. Since its passage, women are reporting a disturbing trend:
families are pressuring their daughters and sisters to circumvent the law by
relinquishing their claim to their inheritance in writing in favor of their
brothers. So what has always been a social practice—women forfeiting their
claim in exchange for family harmony and cordial relations with their parents
and brothers–is increasingly being legally legitimized by written declarations.
Given these strong social customs that prevent women from getting a
share of their parents’ land, robust support systems are needed to help women
stand up for their rights and begin to claim the land that is rightfully
theirs. The government of India has started this by establishing women’s
self-help groups (the Mahila
Samakhya Program) in twelve states. These village-level groups support
women dealing with a variety of challenges, including alcoholic husbands,
domestic violence, unfair labor practices, and disrespected property rights. In
Andhra Pradesh, Landesa trained the volunteers who help run these groups to
help them better advocate for their members’ land rights.
Where microfinance groups
are strong, throughout Odisha, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and West
Bengal, they offer another opportunity to educate and support women on their
land rights.
And local officials, particularly revenue officials, need to be aware of
the challenges women face, and should be trained to support women’s claims to
land. Many local revenue officials are not knowledgeable about women’s rights.
Landesa has begun such training in Odisha. And in Gujarat, the Women’s Group for Women’s Land
Ownership has also been training revenue officials.
Lastly, educating both young boys and girls about their equal
inheritance right will help ensure that they support their mother’s claim to
their family land. Landesa has begun a promising project that has thus far educated 7,000 girls
about their land rights. Another 30,000 girls will enroll later this year, with
boys also participating.
It is in everyone’s
interest that women be recognized as the farmers that they are. Their continued
lack of assets contributes to not only their individual vulnerability, but also
my country’s stubborn poverty.