Economic self-sufficiency is crucial for women’s emancipation because it fundamentally enables autonomy, freedom, and the empowerment necessary to make decisions. It also allows women to live beyond the limits imposed by patriarchal norms.
Equality in the workplace, along with the recognition and enforcement of women’s property rights, are vital instruments for ensuring women’s economic and financial independence.
While the inaccessibility of property is an immediate concern for women in property-owning households, an additional challenge is the impact of patriarchal structures and values on women in households acquiring property through housing schemes and land reforms.
In India, women’s property rights are shaped by laws, customs and social practices. Intestate succession laws — whether codified or customary — determine property distribution when individuals die without wills, a situation that is common. These laws vary by community. The Hindu Succession Act, 1956 (amended 2005), governs Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, while Muslims follow the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937.
Even when legal wills are involved, personal laws and biases often disadvantage women, particularly with regard to land and property rights. This inequitable framework highlights the need for feminist advocacy to secure fair property rights, which are crucial for women’s empowerment and a just future.
A recent study by ActionAid, conducted across 10 states (Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Kerala, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh), involved over 100 in-depth interviews and 50 focus group discussions.
The study drew insights from participants’ personal experiences with property ownership and inheritance. The report examined how constitutional, personal, and customary laws impact women’s land rights and provides a comparative analysis aimed at informing policies that could lead to a fairer legal landscape and more equitable access to property for women.
A holistic approach is required to tackle the gendered challenges associated with property rights and inheritance, particularly in relation to land and property ownership for women, whether from landed or landless families. The key is to ensure that the demand for equitable land distribution is widely disseminated, with a specific focus on women, especially those from poorer sections of society.
Ensuring women’s property rights requires transparency in records, legal awareness and a challenge to cultural biases. Male family members often withhold property information from women, particularly in rural areas, where the lack of documentation exacerbates the issue. Many property transactions are undocumented, leaving women uninformed. However, digitising land records has improved access and supports women’s land rights.
Initiatives like the SWAMITVA Scheme include women as co-owners, with districts such as rural Pune showing that 89 per cent of co-owners are women. Expanding these efforts and ensuring that digitised records are shared with all family members can democratise property information, promote transparency, and empower women in matters of inheritance and property rights.
In rural areas, dowry is often seen as a substitute for daughters’ inheritance, unlike land, which generates income. This practice, particularly prevalent in states like Punjab and Haryana, perpetuates gender inequality. Addressing it requires strict enforcement, reporting, and oversight to separate dowry from inheritance claims and promote equitable property rights.
Implementing supportive legislation to advance women’s property rights (WPR) in India requires significant investments and structured ground initiatives, particularly focused on women’s land rights.
Despite the 2024 Union Budget allocating Rs 3 lakh crore for women’s welfare, including reduced stamp duties for women buyers, resources and localised support mechanisms are essential. Earmarked funds for Panchayats and Municipalities can empower community-based women’s self-help groups, youth groups, and sangathans to support women asserting property claims. Leveraging local governance bodies with increased female representation can be transformative.
Women often seek solace and support from community groups for challenges such as domestic violence, childcare, welfare schemes, and property disputes.
However, these groups often lack the expertise or resources to assist effectively. Property rights issues are further complicated by the digitisation of land records, complex laws, and intersecting caste, class, and gender dynamics. Free legal aid exists but remains underutilised due to limited awareness, time constraints, and fears of prolonged legal battles without community support.
Many women settle disputes out of court to avoid the financial and emotional burden of lengthy legal proceedings. The complex interplay of caste, class, gender, and political relationships makes resolving such matters difficult.
Additionally, women often have a limited understanding of property rights under customary laws, which are uncodified and open to multiple interpretations.
Addressing the patriarchal nature of these laws is crucial for meaningful reform.
Structured, updated training and capacity-building programmes for women’s groups, community leaders, and land staff on property rights are urgently needed. These programmes can empower marginalised women by fostering informed, group-based support mechanisms, providing a robust model for protection and advocacy.
Regarding land and housing, shared ownership models should be considered based on articulated needs. While many women may lack the financial resources to buy property on their own, they might be able to afford to purchase a room within a house if done collectively with other women. Similarly, when the government distributes land for housing or economic purposes, it could consider granting joint ownership to groups of women rather than individuals.
Any allocation of property rights, especially for land, requires evidence-based decision-making. Operational landholding data from the agricultural census provides an indication of who is operating the land. When complemented by land ownership data, it reveals who is the actual tiller and operator of the land, as opposed to the custodian. Such data comparisons can support progressive land ownership entitlements for women and men and aid in the formulation of feminist land reform policies.
Laws related to land, housing, and property need to recognise that women are a diverse group, encompassing varying castes, classes, religions, and indigenous statuses. There is an emergent need to protect and promote the rights of all women — whether single, married, widowed, or in common-law relationships — to inherit land, housing and property.
This includes ensuring that women in marriages or common-law relationships (de facto marriages) can co-own land and housing with either independent titles or shared titles with their partners. Single women should have the right to own land and housing independently, and all women, regardless of marital status, must have equal inheritance rights. There are also other exclusions to address, such as the rights of transgender individuals.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) resources can also create opportunities to advance women’s property rights. Currently, no dedicated CSR spending is allocated specifically for achieving Target 5a of the United Nations-mandated Sustainable Development Goal 5, which relates to equal rights to economic resources and property ownership.
Creating a dedicated resource fund would create a win-win situation, as it would also help corporates comply with their Environmental, Social, and Governance norms, as mandated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India under the Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting.
Since the NITI Aayog’s Multidimensional Poverty Index tracks non-income dimensions of poverty, it should be revised to include an indicator for land and house ownership, with a gendered focus. Including such an indicator would generate evidence and public discourse, creating a cascading and virtuous impact in reducing MPI and advancing other Sustainable Development Goals.
Views expressed are authors' own and do not necessarily reflect that of Down To Earth