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• Examines women's use of courts to claim their shares in ancestral property, as promised by India's 2005 Hindu inheritance law. • Probes High Court judgements over 2005–2020 across regions, using online databases. • Identifies opposing parties, type of property disputed, regional variations in cases, time taken for case disposal. • Analyses case outcomes, source of property granted, and gender bias in language of judgements. • 77% of rulings grant women some property, but only half of these grant their direct share in coparcenary Joint Family Property. Recent decades have seen progressive reform of inheritance laws towards gender equality, both globally and in South Asia. Yet, a wide gender gap persists in actual ownership due to family resistance to endowing daughters with property. Given this, do women use courts to claim their rights across regions? Who are the opposing parties? What kind of property is most disputed? How long do cases take? To what extent do judgements favour women, and does the language of judgements reveal gender stereotypes? No prior study has addressed these questions. This paper does so for India. Here, under the Hindu Succession Amendment Act of 2005 (HSAA 2005), Hindu women achieved legal equality in inheritance rights over all property, including agricultural land and coparcenary joint family property (JFP) in which they now have direct shares by birth. To analyse women's use of courts to claim their coparcenary shares, we draw on the four main online data sources to extract 505 cases (from over 2900 examined) relating to women coparceners, where judgements were delivered in High Courts over 2005–2020. Brothers were the most commonly listed opponents to women's claims and most of the disputes related to land, especially agricultural. In 77% of the cases filed by women or against them, the rulings granted women some share in parental property. But only in 52% of these positive rulings did they receive their direct shares in JFP, while receiving property through other rights in the rest. The legal route thus holds some promise of positive outcomes, but progress specifically in the implementation of the HSAA 2005 remains limited. This will require activating new channels of support for women. Located in the interface of social science and law, this paper would also have relevance for other countries, both methodologically and in substance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper re-focuses attention on the big picture question of the persistently low level of female labour force participation in India. • We show how attention on a binary indicator (in the labour force or out of it) misses a crucial aspect of women's economic/productive work. • We suggest that women's work in developing countries should be viewed in terms of at least three categories. • We find that the social norm that places the responsibility of domestic chores exclusively on women is primarily responsible for women's inability to participate in paid work. • We demonstrate the existence of 'virtuous cycles' within families: a history of working women in the family increases the probability of the woman being in paid work. Based on primary data from a large household survey in seven districts in West Bengal in India, this paper analyses the reasons underlying low labor force participation of women. In developing countries, women who are engaged in unpaid economic work in family enterprises are often not counted as workers, whereas the men are. We show that for women, not being in paid work is not synonymous with not being in the labour force. Women are often involved in expenditure saving activities i.e. productive work within the family, over and above domestic chores and care work. We document the fuzziness of the boundary between domestic work and unpaid (and therefore invisible) productive work that leads to mismeasurement of women's work and suggest methods to improve measurement. Counting women's expenditure-saving activities yields a substantially higher estimate of women's participation in economic work. On social norms, we show that religion and visible markers such as veiling are not significant determinants of the probability of being in paid work. We find that being primarily responsible for domestic chores lowers the probability of "working", after accounting for all the conventional factors. Our data shows substantial unmet demand for paid work. Given that women are primarily responsible for domestic chores, we find that women express a demand for work that would be compatible with household chores. We demonstrate the existence of 'virtuous cycles' within families: a history of working women in the family (mother or mother-in-law ever worked) increases the probability of being in paid work between 18 and 21 percentage points. This suggests that the positive effects of increasing women's labour force participation today are likely to have positive multiplier effects on the prospects for work in future generations of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• India is a least likely case for welfare expansion, challenges dominant explanations and offers a new case. • Welfare expansion accompanied by deepening of democratic state is a legacy of civil society mobilization. • State-civil society dynamics can converge into sustained patterns of both policy and institutional transformation and defending the reforms against political attacks. In the past two decades India experienced an unprecedented expansion of the rights-based welfare. This expansion cut across a range of sectors − education, employment, public health, poverty reduction − but was also accompanied by a dramatic expansion and deepening of state institutions and a shift from patronage politics to citizen empowerment. In this paper we show that India was a least likely case for welfare expansion and that contrary to what the traditional welfare state literature suggests, civil society was a key driver of reform, but even more vitally has played a significant role in institutionalizing reforms, especially at the local level. We focus on the case of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the world's largest public works program, to discuss how civil society in India effectively framed welfare issues, mobilized to defend the law, helped institutionalize new governance structures like social audits by working with the state and are ensuring continuous accountability by cultivating what we call "user publics". We draw on the existing literature, fieldwork on village level welfare reform in different subnational regions of India, direct involvement in civil mobilization around rights based laws for over a decade and an ongoing project in which we are collaborating with some of the key architects of the reforms including an archive of over 3000 primary documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• I am conducting a long-term study on how Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in India take their place and deal with space. • This paper examines the stages between refugeehood and citizenship. • The results suggest that refugeehood is about complex day-to-day living practices that shape identities. • The refugee camp is more than a humanitarian space of assistance, more than a space of exception and biopolitical control. This article looks at subjectivities and regimes of homing from a position of liminality and questions the placements dynamics displayed by Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Tamil Nadu, India. Based on long-term and longitudinal fieldwork conducted in Keezhputhupattu refugee camp near Pondicherry between 2010 and 2023, this study analyses the experience of the refugees, which combines a "know-how" that they have developed due to a life in exile since 1983, which is linked, among other things, to a sometimes well-developed diasporic network; and a restrictive agency that has been granted to them by the Indian and Tamil Nadu authorities, which places them in a regime that is intended to be exceptional. The results of the study are significant and show how families spanning three generations may reproduce their new normalcy and negotiate their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The association between social diversity and state-provided public goods is a central political economy problem. This paper highlights how status inequality is a distinct political channel when diverse groups are spatially segregated. Social status impacts citizens' ability to petition the state successfully and modulates state favoritism or discrimination. We use data from nearly 600,000 Indian villages to show that caste-based status inequality modifies the effect of diversity on local public goods politics. Diversity only negatively impacts local public goods in units where lower-caste groups are numerically preponderant. Such diversity deficit is further amplified when higher-caste groups numerically dominate larger administrative units and lower-caste groups are segregated. • We revisit the theoretical and empirical relationship between status-inequality and development, at a local scale. • We show that when local units are dominated by lower-status groups, public goods are negatively associated with diversity. • The association reverses when higher-status groups are numerically preponderant. • We also show that spatial segregation modulates diversity-development association much to the detriment of low-status groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The Agenda 2030 commitment to LNOB operates as a form of 'doublespeak' in India. • The Agenda 2030 call to end extreme inequality requires facilitating the 'hegemonic struggle'. • The absence of religion in Agenda 2030 masks the way that religion is leveraged by populists. • Pastoralism is a 'pious occupation' where religion shapes connections to the land and animals. • Religion is an important factor in the hegemonic struggle that the LNOB commitment should enable. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development pledged to 'leave no one behind' (LNOB). This article suggests that LNOB can be a form of 'doublespeak', susceptible to being used to mask ideologies and policies that worsen social, political and religious divisions. Despite stated commitments to LNOB, both Agenda 2030 and the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of India adhere to narrow models of development that fail to address and exacerbate the growing problem of religious and other inequalities. This article argues for reclaiming LNOB's radical potential by conceptualising it as an empty signifier that takes on meaning through the hegemonic struggle to articulate what 'left behind' means. It develops this argument through a case study of Hindu Nationalist developmental normativity and two mobile pastoralist communities in Gujarat: Hindu Rabaris and Sufi Muslim Fakirani Jats. The empirical data show that in Gujarat's marketised neo-liberal land regime, mobile pastoralism as a livelihood is increasingly stressed and liable to be constructed as 'left behind'. Simultaneously, the Hindu and Sufi religious practices that shaped pastoralists' relationships with land and animals are being transformed and, framed by the BJP government's promotion of a Hindu nationalist religious identity, are shifting towards adoption of communal Hindu and Muslim identities that exacerbate social and religious inequalities, with particular effects on women. The paper concludes that LNOB has potential to tackle religious and other inequalities and generate a more radical and democratic politics of development if the range of demands that are met by this 'empty signifier' is broadened to challenge the hegemonic representations that dominate, and religion's centrality in this struggle is recognised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]