https://reasonstobecheerful.world/indian-women-land-rights-legal-help/
"When Bhanuben Bharatsingh’s husband died, his elder brother took control of
the field she had tilled all her married life. This was the norm in Gujarat,
the state in western India where she lived, but Bhanuben knew that her family’s
well-being depended on what she did next. So she went to the village
administration office to meet the friendly local paralegal.
“I asked her what I needed to do to assert my right to my husband’s land,” she
says. The paralegal advised her on the documents she needed to collect and
counseled her to talk to her family. “Today, I own the land I till; I have no
problems and no fears. What’s more, I’ve been able to access government schemes
to buy a tractor and a pump for irrigation,” she said in a video testimony.
Bharatsingh is one of those rare women who has been able to access her land
rights in a staunchly patrilineal state where women cultivate fields, but the
majority remain landless. Globally, less than one-fifth of landowners across
the world are women, and almost 40 percent of all countries limit women’s
property rights in some way. Since 2005, Indian law has recognized that
daughters and sons have equal inheritance rights. But while 73 percent of rural
women work in the agriculture sector, only about 14 percent own land.
This is problematic. “Women’s access to land and property titles is the single
most important contributor to their empowerment,” developmental economist Bina
Agarwal says. Her 1994 award-winning book,
A Field of One’s Own, traced
regional variations in women’s land ownership in five South Asian countries,
and highlighted how crucially land tenure impacts women as well as their
families. Subsequent research bears this out: Mothers who own property and
family assets are more likely to spend on the household. Also, their children
are healthier and better educated, when compared to the spending behavior in
families where fathers own everything. Agarwal, now a professor at the
University of Manchester, spearheaded the successful campaign to amend the
Hindu Succession Act in 2005, to give men and women equal inheritance rights
over land.
“In spite of the favorable law, at least for Hindus, we found that women in
rural Gujarat faced significant problems in accessing their land rights,” says
Minal P. of the Working Group of Women for Land Ownership (WGWLO). This
consortium of 48 grassroots NGOs and individuals came together in 2002 after
Agarwal conducted a workshop on land ownership as a livelihood issue for women
in Gujarat. WGWLO observed that rural women had limited access to legal aid and
that the local administration was not fully sensitized to the 2005 amendment to
the Hindu Succession Act. With an agenda to raise awareness about women’s land
rights, as well as to make legal aid more accessible, the consortium has
trained over 200 paralegals from within local communities to help women like
Bharatsingh access their digitized records and fight for their land rights."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
