This is a two-part series, highlighting the burgeoning debate of land access and traces the discrepancies in the process of securing land access for women. It further examines the congruence that exists between the access to land for women and their identity. Part 1 underlines how the influence of international and national level frameworks is limited in character and has not been able to make any significant contribution towards the entitlement of land access to women. Part 2 conceptualizes that women’s access to land should be studied with respect to the women’s class, in this case, her caste.
While we have witnessed a surge of women-specific discussions on land rights, there still exist many fissures that need to be addressed, before we plunge into the discussion about women’s ownership of land. Certain national level efforts have played an obligatory role in defining what ought to be done i.e. including women in the land rights debate and acknowledging their contribution.
However, these plans conveniently miss out to crucial aspects of the issue (i) restatement of the old laws(ii) clarifications on how women are going to be included in the agricultural negotiations in a largely male-dominated and patriarchal setting, and (iii) failure to state who will be answerable if these are not implemented.
The failure to see policies from the lens of gender can also be attributed to the fact that discussions about women are always seen supplementary to the welfare discussion, when instead, they should be seen as harbingers of change in the development dialogue. This failure also results in a lack of nuance involved in the land rights debate, which misses out on the material and ideational causal links specific to gender, which impact the access for women.
The obsession over how to include women in the land rights debate, without any recognition accorded to intersectionality i.e. how land rights would be differentiated between women based on their gender, class, status or marital status, also makes for a peripheral engagement within the problem of land rights for women.
This debate needs to acknowledge:
(i) The involvement of women and men in farming is different. Based on this difference, the contribution of women in agriculture is seen as inferior. Women are usually involved in “subsistence farming” defined by Barnett, etal, (1997) as “farming and associated activities which together form a livelihood strategy where the main output is consumed directly, where there are few if any purchased inputs and where only a minor proportion of output is marketed.” Subsistence is often associated with poor farmers and small farmer holdings. Thus, the discrimination based on subsistence farming can wreak havoc on the already poor conditions of the marginalized population.
(ii) Additionally, it requires an inquiry into the access of the lower caste population as well, in order to determine whether or not, the same access will be provided for all women, irrespective of their caste, class and status.According to the 2011 Census, the Scheduled Castes(SC) constitute about 201.4 million people which is 16.63 % of the entire Indian population, while Scheduled Tribes(ST) constitute 104.3 million people, which is 8.61% of the Indian population. The high poverty incidence among the SC (Dalit) and the ST (Adivasis) in both rural and urban areas demonstrate the alarming exclusion that lower-caste population faces. The SC/ST women also face the consequences for their caste, the sex ratio for SC women is 945 in 1000 men and for ST women it stands at 990 in 1000 men. The caste system is still intrinsic to the Indian society and influences the societal associations, therefore a caste analysis is imperative to the discussion of access to land rights for women.
To engage better with providing land rights to women and marginalised women, the debate related to the access toland for women requires an exploration of the causal antecedents existing at the institutional level, to fully trace the genealogy of power relations that women face. These demand the need to move beyond the household relations at which power dynamics have been already explored such as, the banality of discussions over male vs. female. Instead, the focus needs to be on the complementarities of interests, ideas, and wealth distribution involved across different classes, castes and genders.
Pallavi Karnatak
March 22, 2019
source https://indiaoutbound.org/fissures-underlying-the-land-access-debate-in-india/
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