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Copyright of GENDER: Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A caste is one of the conventional four social strata into which Hindu society separates its members. The scriptures from ancient India make reference to it. The four classes are the Brahmins (priestly people), the Kshatriyas (rulers, administrators, and warriors; also known as Rajanyas), the Vaishyas (artisans, merchants, businessmen, and farmers), and the Shudras are the lowest of the caste system (laboring classes). However, an individual of the lowest class in traditional Indian society falls outside of the Hindu caste system and is subject to severe social restrictions. This commentary is divided into three parts; the first part highlights the caste system, the second part examines the constitutional and legislative safeguards for them, and the third part illustrates the current social disparity of Dalits in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the impact of property rights legislation on the political participation of Scheduled Tribes (STs) - an indigenous community of India. The legislation recognised forest land rights of STs who had been historically residing over forests without formal land titles. Utilising administrative data on land titles, we show that increased demand for land titles increases the political participation of STs as election candidates. This increase is on account of new political candidates that are contested by non-mainstream political parties. We provide evidence that incomplete implementation, that raises but does not meet expectations, is the mechanism. In particular, land title applications that are rejected by sub-district/district-level authorities are driving this increase. Our results suggest that land titling legislations can encourage marginalised beneficiary groups to use political participation as a means to establish their land rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal for Technology in Theory & Practice / Zeitschrift für Technikfolgenabschätzung in Theorie und Praxis (TATuP) is the property of Oekom Verlag GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of this article is to initiate a discussion based on a new reading of field data I collected in Nepal and South India that was triggered by the notion of irrigated land tenure. The first part deals with the way of applying this notion to rice fields. In South Asia, rice fields occupy a discriminating position in administrative and vernacular classifications, which has been turned upside-down by the surge in groundwater irrigation. Moreover, some rice fields may be cultivated without irrigation thanks to monsoon rains. However, this is not reflected in the traditionally used visual representations of irrigation systems (aerial photos, satellite images, maps of irrigation networks) that overlook farmers' difficulties to access to water. The notion of irrigated land tenure, hence, has some limitation in the case of rice cultivation, if non-irrigated rice fields are not clearly identified. However, this notion has the advantage of making explicit the interest to analyse the links between water rights and land rights, which is the purpose of the second part of this paper. In a context of legal pluralism, the examples discussed show the diversity of these interactions: in some cases water rights are modified so as to increase the size of the irrigated land; in others the use of water is instrumental in obtaining a legitimate land right. In contrast, in the case of tenancy situations, the status of land tenure continues to jeopardize access to water. The tenure status of an irrigated or potentially irrigable land is important to consider in order to understand the dynamics of water management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land and property rights play a critical role in enhancing agency and empowerment of women. Secure and equitable land rights of women are integral in achieving gender equality and empowerment of women and the overall development of the country. Women own less than 20 per cent of the world's land even when more than 400 million women engage in agricultural activities and produce the majority of the world's food supply. Land is a contested socio-cultural issue for women as they are often denied agency both in their natal and marital home. The inequitable distribution of land and natural resources puts women in an unfavourable position, exacerbating the add-ons of gender inequality and discrimination, which in effect, make both their natal as well as marital homes, a no woman's land. Within the conceptual framework of agency, empowerment and sustainable development, this paper analytically reviews the contemporary land right issues of women in India using secondary data sources; probes into the pertinent issues and challenges; identifies policy as well as implementation gaps; and further suggests policy interventions which will enhance property rights, entitlements, access and control over resources in favour of women, that could lead the country towards achieving Agenda 2030. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article links the feminist debate on women's land rights in India to the current academic debate on critical human-nature relationships in the Anthropocene by studying how married Hindu women weigh the pros and cons of claiming land in their natal family and how they practice their lived relatedness to land in rural Udaipur (Rajasthan, North India). The article disentangles the complex issue of why women do not respond eagerly to Indian state policies that for a long time have promoted gender equality in the domain of land rights. In reaction to the dominant feminist debate on land rights, the authors introduce religion and more-than-human sociality as analytical foci in the examination of women's responsiveness to land legislation. Their ethnographic study is based on fieldwork with married women in landowning families in four villages in Udaipur's countryside. The authors argue that women have well-considered reasons not to claim natal land, and that their intimate relatedness to land as a sentient being, a nonhuman companion, and a powerful goddess explains the women's reluctance to treat land as an inanimate commodity or property. Looking at religion brings to the fore women's core business of making land fruitful and powerful, independent of any legislation. The authors maintain that a decolonized perspective on women's land relatedness that takes religion and women's multispecies perspective seriously may also offer a breakthrough in understanding why some women do not claim land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on multi‐sited fieldwork and discourse analysis of government orders, we investigate land‐titling programmes that distribute marginal public land to the poor in both urban and rural South India. We suggest understanding this type of distribution as a process of creating a subaltern category of land ownership to facilitate governance of lands and people entangled in de facto land tenures. Although these titling initiatives have been largely ignored or dismissed as failures in the existing literature, we argue that they have had significant socio‐political effects. First, we argue that, despite the attempt to create a differentiated property regime, titling engenders a complex juridico‐legal terrain where the bounds of 'subaltern citizenship' are contested and negotiated. Second, we show that titling is better understood as a process that creates new social relations and new expectations of the normative relationship between state and citizen. Finally, we suggest that the practices and discourses of the land bureaucracy are a window into the production of spatial relations based on pressures from above and below. In sum, we show how a history of iterative titling has resulted in the entanglement of struggles over possession, personhood and citizenship for marginalized groups in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long been attentive to the relationship between legal regimes and agrarian dispossession in the resource frontiers of the postcolonial world. The analytical problem of identifying how private firms use legal regimes to take control of land—whether for mining, plantations, or Special Economic Zones—now animates a new body of research seeking the historical antecedents for contemporary land grabs. In the case of colonial South Asia, existing scholarship has often tended to suggest that the law precedes processes of capital accumulation, and that colonial capital operated within the confines of definable, even if legally plural, institutional regimes, such as property rights and commercial law. This perspective suggests, if only implicitly, that capitalist firms prefer to work within formal frameworks of legality. In this article, I outline a different understanding of the place of law in colonial South Asia, which follows the formation of property law for coal at the end of the nineteenth century. I argue that the discursive framing of coal's status as property emerged out of, rather than preceded, social and ecological displacements caused by a coal commodity boom after 1894. Reconstructing conflicts over coal-bearing agrarian land through civil court records and mining company property deeds, I demonstrate how the absence of coal property within the colonial legal archive was reassembled through a recursive conception of legality. This genealogy of law recovers the historical context for contemporary struggles over mining claims in India's coal region today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The adivasi population represents a special case in India's new land wars. Strong individual and community rights to agricultural and forest lands have been enacted for this group based on notions of adivasi identities as primeval, but without linking these to economic and political influence. This article interrogates the adivasi land question seen through a caste lens. It does so via case studies in two states to understand the ways in which adivasi identity can be mobilised for its instrumental value and used to demand land rights. In Andhra Pradesh, the Supreme Court's Samatha Judgement has prevented virtually all private mining activities. In Jharkhand, however, similar legislation is seen to be trumped by the national Coal Bearing Areas Act, as well as by former and current land acquisition acts that allow industrial land claims to take precedence over identity-based ones. Available evidence indicates the challenges involved in bringing support for land rights that are premised on a supposedly unchanging adivasi identity when these rights go against dominant interests. This circumstance serves to highlight the possibilities present in caste analysis to understand the plight of adivasis, despite their usually distinct treatment in scholarly analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India, the historically disadvantaged groups of tribal people categorised as the Schedule Tribes have largely remained on the fringes of growth. There is a constitutional provision the Sixth Schedule applicable in certain areas of tribal territorial majorities in the North East of India that recognises the. The question is how effective these legal mechanisms are in protecting the tribal population against marginalisation. This article presents a case study of the socio-political dynamics of community ownership and control of land in the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, a state in North East India where the tribal people are in the majority. This work aims to analyse more closely the operations and efficacy of the Sixth Schedule as a land governance framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines and compares the status of land rights and their impacts on agricultural productivity, food security and well-being in a set of tribal and non-tribal villages in Telangana. Based on an intensive field survey, the research confirms that tribals without formal land rights remain largely unable to benefit from government support and access to private institutions in terms of getting credit and farm extension, whereas in non-tribal villages, government organisations are pro-active in providing such support. These findings confirm the need to increase the effectiveness of land rights and title documentation in India's tribal villages to protect local people's investments in land, enhance agricultural productivity and strengthen the long-term effectiveness of government programmes, which include avoidance of migration to the big cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • The paper shows how spirituality strategically supports an Adivasi self-empowerment movement in India. • Spirituality provides motivation, makes groups' indigeneity visible, and protects their activities against reprisals. • Tribal groups in India using this strategy can escape debt bondage and gain their own land. • Action organisations working with subaltern groups can orchestrate spirituality to achieve progressive goals. Spirituality strategically enables self-empowerment in a clandestine movement of Adivasis which this paper calls 'the Programme'. To explain how social movements and action organisations can orchestrate spirituality, this paper examines how the Programme helps landless rural people overcome debt bondage and gain land by employing spiritual repertoires. The paper addresses the question how, in the context of an increasingly tribalised politics in India, spiritual orchestration allows some Scheduled Tribes to make substantive economic gains, especially on debt freedom and land rights. The paper draws on an analysis of qualitative data collected through workshops, interviews and visits to villages across several Indian states, which has been anonymised to protect identities and avoid divulging sensitive information. The study finds that spirituality supports self-empowerment in three ways: first, it provides motivation and ideological reinforcement for people engaging in struggles against debt bondage and for land rights; second, it makes tribal identity more visible and helps groups make claims as indigenous owners; third, it offers groups protection from reprisals and creates platforms for engaging powerful actors. These findings are significant because, for activists and scholars who work with subaltern groups in India or other contexts, they demonstrate that the orchestration of spirituality can strengthen action repertoires for self-empowerment and help groups secure or protect economic and social gains. The paper adds insights to research on social movements and organisations on how to strengthen the 'weapons of the weak'; it contributes empirical knowledge about how strategies to overcome debt and exploitation can succeed; and it underscores the importance of protecting freedom of religion and belief in development practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women play critical roles in agricultural operations in many developing countries, yet they have limited ownership and de facto control over agricultural lands. Literature shows that insecure land rights constrain women's economic prospects and make them vulnerable to poverty and violence. Despite initiating women-friendly amendments in existing polices in India, the situation has remained unresponsive. Clearly, the existing patriarchal mind-set, cultural and social ethos have imposed restrictions on women land ownership. For deriving important policy pointers, ground realities on land distribution and existing iniquities is required which is lacking in available databases. In this context, the paper aims to reinforce with evidence the bias against women in land rights at different stages so that policy can be rethought in new ways. The analysis is based on sex-disaggregated data extracted from nearly 16,000 original digital copies of land records for 12 States/Union Territories (UTs) in rural India, a first of its kind of exercise. Our results show that just having a title won't resolve the bigger challenge of different levels of inequities that women still face when they own the land in terms of limited access to single land titles, lower shares, smaller size and inferior quality of land holdings. We also analyse the extent to which the States laws and provisions related to women land rights have controlled these biases, for which State-wise laws/ provisions were reviewed. We find mixed impacts of these provisions with significant variations across States, the reasons being lack of proper implementation and prevailing social attitudes/ customs. Finally, while emphasising the need to start rethinking and reinforcing these laws and provisions in a new way, the paper suggests feasible steps in this direction. • The paper reinforces with evidence the bias against women in land titles so that policy can be rethought in new ways. • It's the first of its kind of analysis where digital copies of the land records were examined to show ground realities. • Even as landowners women face discrimination with limited access to single titles, smaller land size and inferior quality. • Lack of proper implementation, social attitudes, and customs have restricted the impacts of provisions in some states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the trajectory of the changing lives of Adivasi women of eastern and central India, i.e., the erstwhile Chotanagpur Division and the Santal Parganas of the Bengal Presidency under colonial times, and which is today incorporated largely within the state of Jharkhand. In India today, Adivasi women figure among some of the most deprived of people living in the margins, much of their vulnerability arising from unequal access to resources, particularly their right to inherit paternal property, and rooted in their socio-economic norms. Colonial rule, on the one hand, witnessed the increasing marginalisation of tribal women with the weakening of the communal indigenous organisations which left them exposed to exploitation of the market forces. On the other hand, it also enabled the empowerment of a section of Adivasi women who asserted their right to inherit ancestral property. In contrast, the politics of indigeneity in contemporary India have imposed restrictions on Adivasi women's bid to claim land rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study evaluates the impact of India’s land-allocation and registration program in West Bengal, a program that targets poor populations and promotes the inclusion of women’s names on land titles. Although we are unable to detect statistically significant program effects on current household food security, we find that the program has positive impacts on a range of outcomes that are expected to lay the foundation for future food security including improved security of tenure, agricultural investments, and women’s involvement in food and agricultural decisions. Findings provide lessons in designing and implementing innovative and integrated approaches to reduce hunger and undernutrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of women's rights and title to land has, once again, assumed center stage. In the wake of concerns about the feminization of rural poverty, the question of land rights for women is pressing. This paper delineates the differential modes and implications of self-acquiring and inheriting arable lands within the tenurial classes of the former princely state of Malerkotla in the Sangrur district of Punjab, India. It examines the pattern of legal titles to land from 1890 onwards based largely on the information yielded by the local- level revenue records at Malerkotla and then focuses on the rights of women in the context of the pre-eminently patrilineal transmission of rights in land. Finally, it explores the significance of this enquiry for land and gender studies and possible social interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bauxite mineral projects in central India have in recent years generated conflicts over both the physical environment and equitable development for very vulnerable people. In one such project, a joint venture between the state government of Andhra Pradesh and a private investor, attempts are currently being made to open up land constitutionally reserved for India's Scheduled Tribes. The final outcome, though still uncertain, depends not only on the relative material resources of the opposing parties, but on a drawn-out process of contestation where the discursive resistance to tribal land dispossession has strong historical roots and many active supporters. Thus, for the project's promoters, their advantage rests on their ability to create confusion via superior access to, and control over, information, rather than relying on their direct authority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: Indigenous people''s struggles in South India for the last four decades have been centred on the general politics of land rights. However, struggles in the recent past have been clearly delineated as striving to not merely gain access to land for cultivation, but also to claim formal individual titles to parcels of land. Taking this as the point of departure, a study was undertaken with the objective of assessing the willingness to pay (WTP) for obtaining management rights as well as individual titles to land among the indigenous people in Kerala, using the contingent valuation method (CVM). Two types of land market exist in the region: the adivasi land market and the general land market. The adivasi land market is imperfect and transactions are restricted to within the indigenous population. This study shows that indigenous people are willing to pay a higher amount than the existing market price for adivasi lands. The WTP for obtaining formal management rights for adivasi land is estimated to be 20.75 per cent of the existing general land market price while the WTP for obtaining formal ownership rights is 32.63 per cent. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In April 2008 over 2,600 single women marched for three days to Shimla, the state capital of the northwestern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, to demand rights to land, health care and ration cards for single women. The march was organized by a new social movement called Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan, comprising divorced, abandoned, never married women, widows and wives fleeing domestic violence who are demanding rights from the state in their own names (rather than as wives, daughters or mothers); in so doing they are directly challenging the construct of the 'dependent woman' naturalized in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial discourses. The most radical of the demands of this new social movement is the struggle for land rights and the creation of new women-centred family formations. Through an analysis of their collective demands, I argue that the normative, dependent woman is mutually constituted not only at the intersections of gender, kinship and heterosexuality, but also spatially, through denial of rights to land. As single women disown their dependence upon husbands/fathers/brothers and demand land rights, they simultaneously re-imagine gendered selves by envisioning new marital families and re-working the division of labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Gender is emerging as a central analytical construct in exploring landed property ownership and tenancy relationships in India. This article explores the nature of land tenure and landed property rights in slums in India from a gender perspective. The author raises key issues that need consideration in developing a gendered vision of urban land rights, tenure, and reform by documenting some of the central findings of her field research conducted in slums in Ahmedabad, India, in collaboration with the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA). In each case, the author also draws out policy recommendations for redressing discrepancies in women’s ownership of urban land and housing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]