Context: The case for women’s land rights is as strong today as it was at Independence. Despite significant advancement in inheritance laws, only a small percentage of women own land in rural landowning households.
Issue

• 75 years after India’s Independence, 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, Indian women nowhere near equality in owning agricultural land, the most important property in rural India.
• A large global literature shows that owning land would enhance a woman's well-being, improve children’s health and education, reduce domestic violence, raise farm productivity, increase family food security, and empower women socially and politically. 
• Gender-equal land rights is also a key target in SDG 5 on gender equality. Yet policy is far behind.

Hindu Succession Act (HSA), 1956

• It had given Hindu women substantial rights in property, but two major inequalities remained. 
• First, the inheritance of agricultural land devolved according to land reform laws which were highly gender unequal, especially in six northern states. 
• Second, daughters were excluded from coparcenary rights in joint family property.
• 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 on par with sons. 
• But the discriminatory clause for agricultural land remained. 
• The HSAA 2005, however, following a civil society campaign brought about gender equality in law on both counts across all states.

Key Concerns

• Until recently this question could not be answered, given a lack of gender- disaggregated data on land ownership. 
• Neither the agricultural census nor the NSSO surveys on ownership holdings disaggregate by gender, and people often incorrectly cite gender figures on operational holdings as ownership figures. 
• Despite significant advancement in inheritance laws, women were found to own land in only 16 per cent of the sampled 1,114 rural landowning households, and just 8.4 per cent 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. 
• Also, strikingly, 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. 
• Very few women were co-owners in joint family property, and over half the owners of both genders were aged 50 or more. 
• Hence, even women who own land receive it too late in life to notably improve their well-being or bargaining power in families.

Road Ahead

• Looking ahead, we urgently need more gender-disaggregated data on land ownership, and innovative policies to increase women’s actual ownership. 
• Telangana’s example shows that state leadership, starting with chief ministers, can make a big difference. So can civil society. 
• Women themselves need to raise their claims more vocally, as they did in the 1930s and ’40s. Notably, despite vast numbers of women joining the ongoing protests against farm laws, we hear barely a whisper about their claims in family land.
• Also 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.

Additional Information
SDG Goal  5

• Goal 5 aims to eliminate all forms of discrimination and violence against women in the public and private spheres and to undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources and access to ownership of property.

IndiaGoal 5 and India

• Although India has achieved gender parity at the primary education level and is on track to achieve parity at all education levels, as of June 2019, the proportion of seats in the Lok Sabha held by women had only reached 11% but 46% in the Panchayati Raj Institutions. 
• India is also confronting the challenge of violence against women. As an example, a baseline study revealed that in New Delhi, 92% of women had experienced some form of sexual violence in public spaces during their lifetime. 
• In 2016, close to a third of total crimes reported against women in India was cruelty or physical violence by her husband or his relative. 
• The Government of India has identified ending violence against women as a key national priority, which resonates with the Sustainable Development targets of the United Nations on gender equality. 
• The prime minister’s Beti Bachao Beti Padhao initiative aims at equal opportunity and education for girls in India. 
• In addition, specific interventions on female employment, programmes on the empowerment of adolescent girls, the Sukanya Samridhi Yojana on girl child prosperity and the Janani Suraksha Yojana for mothers advance India’s commitment to gender equality, and the targets of Goal 

Targets

• End all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere, along with all forms of violence in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation.
• Eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation.
• Recognise and value unpaid care and domestic work through the provision of public services, infrastructure and social protection policies and the promotion of shared responsibility within the household and the family as nationally appropriate.
• Ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life.
• Ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights as agreed in accordance with the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and the Beijing Platform for Action and the outcome documents of their review conferences.
• Undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources, in accordance with national laws.
• Enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women.
• Adopt and strengthen sound policies and enforceable legislation for the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls at all levels.

By: Shubham Tiwari