Land and freedom? Indian women gaining power through property

The Magna Carta gave specific rights to those who owned land. Ritu Menon reports on how Indian women find property ownership gives them more power to be heard

“WE WANT LAND, all the rest is humbug,” women in a South Indian village told feminist researchers Maria Mies and Lalita Kumari when asked whether they wanted better houses. The village women said they wanted land that they could till and preferably own, so they could make a modest profit from the crops they grew and have access to agricultural credit and subsidies.

Not only is land a highly emotive issue, it’s a hugely complicated one, with ownership being governed by a plethora of laws and customary practice. In India, legislation relating to land, especially agricultural land, is a state subject. This means that each of the country’s 28 states can enact its own laws regarding, for example, forest cover, the state’s right to appropriate land under the law of eminent domain, and the alienation of land held by a community or tribe.

There are increasing numbers of women engaged in agricultural work as men migrate to urban areas in search of paid jobs. Although rural women are responsible for 60 to 80 per cent of India’s food production, only nine per cent own the land they till, according to government figures.

The depth of these women’s importance is illustrated by agriculture’s place in India’s economy. Six out of 10 people are still engaged in farming. That is roughly 600 million, of whom the vast majority – 80 per cent – are women. Most are not recognised as farmers, either legally or socially.

Then there are laws governing inheritance and succession, depending on which religion you belong to. As of 2005, Hindu women can now inherit all property equally, and sons and daughters have equal co-parcenary rights: that is they can be joint heirs to an undivided property. Non-Hindu women on the other do not enjoy such rights. This is because they are governed by the inheritance and succession provisions of their religious laws, Christian, Muslim or Parsi. Yet even when the law grants women equal rights, patriarchal attitudes and a strong bias in favour of men mean the possibility of them becoming landowners is reduced.

Extensive land reform in India began soon after the country’s independence in 1947. Huge feudal landholdings were taken over by the state and redistributed. The princely states, which collected agricultural revenue and even had their own militia, were no longer recognised. Their lands, which had covered significant parts of the country, came under state control.

States with more socialist governments, particularly the southern state of Kerala, and West Bengal in the east, went in for extensive redistribution of agricultural land, and as early as the 1970s, movements for making over land to women had begun to emerge. The Bodh Gaya movement in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, managed for the first time in the country’s history to wrest land titles for women. In Bina Agarwal’s article Why Property Rights for Women Matter she quotes women who spoke powerfully about the importance of land ownership. They said: “We had tongues, but could not speak. We had feet but could not walk. Now that we have land. We have the strength to speak and walk.”

Only nine per cent of Indian women own the land they till. Here, women pick leaves from tea plants in Vandiperiyar, Kerala

Credit: Melvyn Longhurt/ Alamy

Landesa Rural Development Institute is an international NGO that partners with state governments in four states in India, to develop policies that allow poor women to lease farmland and to ensure that their names are included in land titles. One of these states is Orissa, on the east coast of the country, where less than three per cent of agricultural land is owned by women.

In 2005-2006, the state announced an innovative government scheme, Vasundhara, by which all poor, landless families in rural areas are eligible for land allotment, whether they are male or female-headed.

Budhi Pradhan, a 62-year-old woman of Chilipoi village in Orissa, is one of the beneficiaries of this scheme. She, along with 19 other families, received joint titles to small homestead plots in 2010, which increased farmland to one acre each, in 2011. According to Rakhi Ghosh, a journalist with the independent Women’s Feature Service, who visited Chilipoi, the women have proved to be excellent landowners, and their influence in the village has grown. She reports: “Once the women had their plots they decided to look beyond their family’s needs and play a bigger role in the development of their village.”

In 2011 they took over the management of the common resource of the village, a four-acre cashew plantation. Ghosh quotes Hatu Pradhan, a member of the women’s self-help group: “We got the plantation on lease and worked day and night to ensure a return on our investment. That year itself we earned INR25,000 ($407) and, after paying back all expenses and the cost of leasing, we were left with a surplus income of INR15,900 ($258).”

Now that we have land, we have the strength to speak and walk

An additional INR2,000 ($32) was made from the sale of jackfruit from another community plantation they had acquired on lease at around the same time. Pradhan said: “We collected all this money to start fish farming in a pond that was provided by the block development office as a water harvesting structure.” Now, even the men in their families seek the women’s opinion on what to cultivate, how to sell their crops and how to invest the money earned. Laxmi, another member, said: “Land ownership has changed our lives. We now have a voice and our own standing in society.”

Today, a mere three years later, the women are focusing on issues such as education and electricity.

Owning land can afford safeguards that go beyond the economic ones of income. Feminist economist Bina Agarwal studied 502 married women between the ages of 15 and 49 in the rural and urban areas of Thiruvananthapuram district in Kerala. She found that spousal violence against women was at 49 per cent for those women who neither owned land nor a house, but dropped to seven per cent among those who owned both. For those who owned only a house or land, it was 10 per cent and 18 per cent respectively.

Other studies, however, have pointed out that owning land can be a mixed blessing: husbands, brothers, uncles and sons may resort to physical violence in order to gain control of property owned by women in their families. Intimidation can be an effective deterrent for a woman who insists on claiming her rights, and since 86 per cent of arable land in India is still privately owned, the scope for coercion and retaining patriarchal control is considerable.

Any attempt to break free of oppression is a two steps forward, one-step-back exercise, so too with women’s access to land, and power. But, as the women of Chilipoi say: “It took 40 years for the government to understand the need to give women titles to land, it is good to see that those who once could not even speak to the men in their village are now taking the lead in rural development.”