The following excerpt is taken from the chapter ‘Women’s rights and entitlements to land in South Asia’

IN India, agrarian reforms through [the] 1950s and later took place at a time when gender was marginal to the policy agenda and women’s organisations lacked their current visibility. Hence, in most government land reform programmes and land transfers, women’s land rights remained marginal. Apart from the personal laws, tenurial laws also impacted women’s land ownership in varied ways since land laws remain a state subject. However, owing to intense lobbying by women’s organisations, academics and even policymakers, joint titles and other land-based entitlements found a place in the Five Year Plans since the 1980s. It took almost half a century to amend (2005) the Hindu Succession Act (HSA, 1956), giving Hindu women equal inheritance rights to agricultural land and overriding the state tenurial laws. Daughters including married daughters, also became coparceners in joint family property. However, legal changes remain a vision as ground realities and the diverse forms and levels of engagement on women’s land rights suggest.

Following the strike for minimum and equal wages by women agricultural workers in 1989 when women refused to harvest the crop, the Mahila Mazdoor Evam Laghu Kisan Morcha was formed with the support of a civil society organisation, DISHA (Saharanpur, UP ). In June 2006, a campaign called Aaroh was launched, along with other organisations, in 10 districts of UP for recognition of women as farmers.

In a survey preceding this campaign covering 10 villages of these districts, covering 2,500 women farmers, those women were perceived as labourers and not as farmers. In January 2007, the Mahila Kisan Hit Adhikar Yatra or procession covered five gram panchayats. Women farmers from each gram panchayat handed letters to the pradhan (chairperson of gram panchayat) of the villages demanding access to government schemes for agriculture. Representations were made to district magistrates for recognition of women at policy levels. Using varied forms of folk forms including a play ‘Mahila Kisan’, travelling on foot and in bullock carts, the campaign/yatra has since 2008 been extended to all 70 districts of UP, with DISHA itself directly promoting the campaign in 14 districts of western UP. This includes orientation meetings at local and later at district levels, visits to government departments to gather data on women farmers, to banks for number of Kisan Credit Cards in the name of women and to tehsils to determine women’s membership in Mandi Samitis. A state-level workshop held in Lucknow involved organisations from 50 districts.

Organisations have emerged focusing on specific categories of rural women, such as the Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan (ENSS, formed in 1999 and now extending over 27 of the 33 districts of Rajasthan). Focusing on widows’ rights to land, ENSS decided to adopt the strategy of direct action at local level instead of approaching the courts. According to Chaggibai Bhil, a leader of ENSS:

“In the 27 zilllas that we work, we cannot be going to court all the time. There have been 150 to 180 cases in the past five years, 60 in the past year alone. Where there are barriers, those cases go to court. Sometimes there are setbacks too. Court cases are lengthy, take a lot of energy.”

When a widow approaches ENSS, a committee is sent to the patwari (revenue clerk) to look at land records. A date is set by ENSS for claiming the land, the collector approached but who generally sends a revenue official. High-level police officials are also invited and an elected member of the panchayat as also members of other civil society organisations. The patwari reads out the title, usually to the brother-in-law, who may not attend. In declaring the title, women’s organisations, policy, administration, elected representatives and sometimes caste panchayat members are involved.

As Ginny Srivastava, a founding member of ENSS, puts it, “She farms her land, feeds her children, gains dignity and justice, becomes a reality.” This approach has been successful with lawyers giving only legal advise. ENSS has been formed in Himachal Pradesh where one of the demands for single women include two acres of land on long-term lease from the government’s pool of surplus land. In Kutch, Ekal Nari Shakti Manch (ENSM) was formed post earthquake and now extends over seven districts in Gujarat. The ENSM pointed out that the state government had allocated 45.6 lakh hectares of wasteland to corporates and big farmers on 20-year lease in Kachchh, overlooking the demands of rural poor women, including single women, for land. To date, ENSM has succeeded in getting property rights including land for 215 women, 7,200 applications have been made to the local administration, 25 women house/plot for house from the husband’s property.

The outcomes of state policy, laws, government programmes are located within a nested hierarchy of local governance institutions, varied interests / actors and, hence, the struggle for women’s land rights involves a multipronged strategy of mass campaigns, negotiations, winning cooperation, if not support at these many levels, as the experiences of Working Group on Women and Land Ownership (WGWLO), a Gujarat-based network of 23 organisations, indicates. Perhaps one of the few state-level networks in India working on women’s land rights itself suggests the significance of separate focus and emphasis by establishing the importance of the issue among rural women, building organisations of support, impacting the development dialogue in the state, different actors at local levels including the land administration and policy.

Two participatory studies by WGWLO played a significant role in developing strategies. The study of women’s agricultural land ownership in Gujarat covered 10 districts, 15 tehsils, 23 villages. The study pointed to the deprivation of a basic productive resource for rural women — land — in a state showing high indicators of economic development. In the 22 villages, 4,188 men (81 per cent) as against 561 (11.81 per cent) women owned land. The land is owned jointly or individually or in the marital place by women.

Of the 403 cases of land ownership by women for which data could be collected, 193 or 47.89 per cent owned land following widowhood, 167 (41.43 per cent) were given ownership to avail benefit from government programmes to escape land ceiling, get tax benefits, save expenses (bribe) of paying talati (revenue official) for entry of name in land record (talatis took lower rates of bribe for women). In 18 (4.46 per cent) of the 403 cases, women received land ownership since parents had no male heirs. There were three cases where women owned the land since their husbands were not farmers and hence not entitled to own land. There were 10 cases from tribal and Muslim communities who received land when their husbands married a second time.

Excerpted with permission from Women and Law: Critical Feminist Perspectives

Edited by Kalpana Kannabiran, Director, Council for Social Development, Hyderabad, India

2014 / 324 pages

ISBN 9788132113133

SAGE Publications, India