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Land Rights Challenges of Women and Poor in Conflict Areas

IFPRI Workshop on Gender and Food Security29 August, 2016

Somdatta Mandal and Naveen Kumar

Introduction• Globally, land is a major cause of conflict. • In land related conflicts, the worst sufferers are women and poor, whose

land rights are not often recognized by society and laws. Land rights challenges of these segments of the society is especially higher in areas with a high level of internal conflicts.

• The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) defines internal conflicts as ‘protracted armed confrontations’ occurring between governmental armed forces and the forces of one or more armed groups, or between such groups arising on the territory of a State, in which the armed confrontation reaches a certain level of intensity and the parties involved in the conflict show a certain level of organization (ICRC, 2008).

• In India, rural poor and tribals are at the centre of these conflicts. • In parts of eastern and central regions of India, the internal conflicts take

place between the Indian state and Left Wing Extremists (LWEs). Jharkhand is part of this region.

Land Rights Challenges of Poor & Women in Jharkhand

• The prevailing laws related to land in Jharkhand are Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act (1908) and Santhal Parganas Tenancy Act (1949). Under both of these laws women are not entitled to own land. This creates further problems for women in the conflict affected region of Jharkhand.

• As armed conflicts continue, many of the men disappear, flee, are taken into custody, or are injured and become disabled. With men engaged in fighting, women are left alone to care for the household. To sustain their livelihoods, women need access to farming resources, including financial loans, which they might not be able to get.

• Women often face unsurmountable problems if the death of their male relatives – fathers or husbands – deprives them of inheriting family land and property. By law or customs, the property of the deceased is often inherited by male members of the family and as a result, women who lose their male relatives can lose their livelihoods and become homeless or dependent on the help of others.

• Land rights of the poor are also neglected in Jharkhand.

MethodologyMethodology• 10 villages 5 each in Gumla

& Khunti were selected after talking to district revenue officials

• Quantitative Survey: – 117 women -

interviewed.Purposive sampling

• Qualitative Survey:– 6 Women FGD; 13 KIIs– 10 IDIs; 9 Case Studies

Snowball approach

Key Findings- Women’s Land Ownership

• Even though 86.3% of the households in our sample were from landowning households, very few of them had land legally documented in their names.

• This was the case both for homestead land as well as for agricultural land: only 4.3% of the homestead plots and 3% of the agricultural plots were owned by women, either solely or jointly.

• By contrast, 59% of homestead plots and 66.9% of agricultural plots were owned by men

• One-third of respondents were unsure/ unaware of their status of ownership

Homestead Land Agricultural Land

4.3

59.0

2.6

34.1

Owned by female HHs membersOwned by male HHs membersDon't knowNo response

2.366.2

0.73.7

27.1

Owned by female HHs membersOwned by male HHs membersJointly owned by female and male HHs membersDon't knowNo response

Women’s Decision-making Power• The study finds that a considerable proportion of women are not involved in family

decisions regarding use of family land. Forty percent or more of the women interviewed reported that they were not involved in their family's decisions on how to use the plots, what to grow, or whether to sell the crops. Women’s participation was starkly lower when it came to decisions related to selling the plots: 70% of the women interviewed said they would not be involved.

• When women do participate in decisions, they are unlikely to be the sole decision maker. Instead they are involved in joint decision-making processes with the husband or other family members. Women had the largest level of autonomy when it came to managing the proceeds from selling crops: over half said they made decisions on how to use those funds.

• The majority of the women we interviewed worked on the family land. The agricultural work was largely done by women, or by both women and men. The only agricultural activity exclusively carried out by men was ploughing and this was because tribal customs forbid women from touching the ‘hal’ (plough). Of the women interviewed, 5.7% worked alone on the plots of land, 21.7% worked jointly with their husbands and 29.2% worked with other family members.

Perceptions & Awareness of Women Regarding Land Rights

• Tribal women had very little awareness of women’s land rights.• When we questioned women regarding their own land rights over parental land,

while the majority thought they had the rights, the qualitative fieldwork suggested that by ‘rights to land’ women largely meant that they had custodial rights, and could live off of parental land if they became widows or were abandoned by their husband and in-laws.

• When we asked women whether daughters, like sons, should receive a share of parental land, only 20% said yes.

• An overwhelming majority of women interviewed (95.6%) said that a widow had rights over her late husband’s land. However, in the qualitative survey most respondents also opined that the woman would be vulnerable to eviction by her husband’s family members since she would not have the land legally documented in her own name.

• Cases were also recounted by women where the husband’s male family members (or others in the community who wanted to lay claim on the land) hired members of an LWE group to evict women who lived alone, either widowed or abandoned. Even when the women were not evicted, they did not have the right to sell the land. The land in this case would pass down to their sons if they had them.

Vulnerability Associated with Women’s Land Ownership

• We asked women whether their households had received threats of eviction from outsiders. Four percent of the women said that, yes, their households had been threatened, but only 1% said they were worried because the household could be asked to leave their land.

• Single women are in a considerably more vulnerable position: 36.4% of the single women we interviewed reported receiving threats. It was found that sometimes families enlist help from LWEs to handle interfamily or intra-family disputes—dangerous situations that tend to result in physical harm.

• In addition, single women are also in danger of losing their land through defaulting on their loan payments, as we learned in qualitative interviews where some women said that they only discovered that their land had been put as collateral by their husbands after the husband had already died from Naxal-related violence.

Transfer and Disputes over Land• According to the CNTA and SPTA, tribal lands are largely non-transferable to

non-tribals. However, qualitative fieldwork reveals that there have been instances of tribal lands being usurped by others from the same community, as well as by non-tribals through a ‘might is right’ approach that involves threats or payments.

• When asked who had been responsible for the land encroachment, 44% of the women interviewed said it was their own family members, 33.3% said it was people from outside the village, and 11.1% said it was other village members. Intra-family challenges were more pronounced among the SCs and STs as 100% of SC women and 50% of ST women accused their own family members of land encroachment, while no women from the higher castes did.

Conclusion• Women’s vulnerability regarding land rights in Jharkhand results from weak

enforcement of the laws, prevailing patriarchal norms, and stalled development programs which could not be properly implemented because of the violence.

• As external sale of land in this area is limited and women are not entitled to inherit land, the main avenue for women to obtain rights to land is through the government. Jharkhand already has laws and programs in place concerning government land allocation. However, two key challenges that will have to be addressed for the government programs to be effective are: (i) the program’s design and implementation must take into account the presence of LWEs; and (ii) the program’s design and implementation must consider that identifying and reaching women requires innovative approaches.

• Landesa’s CRP model, which engages village youth (community resource persons) drawn from the community to serve as the on-the-ground arm of the government, can help in this regard.

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