#Women’sDay2019: Understanding Women’s Rights to Property in India

Among the few factors that bind many women across the world together regardless of religion or language one is the right to property.

According to Landesa, the nonprofit organisation that partners with governments and other political institutions to improve women’s rights to property, as of 2016, there are 400 million women who work as farmers, of which 70% are in South Asia.

In many cases, they are even breadwinners for the family but they still have little or no rights to own land. The latest report from the World Bank in 2018 estimates that “40% of economies have at least one constraint on women’s property rights.”

In India, 40% of women depend on agriculture to earn a living by working in plantations or agricultural factories, says a 2017 report from Oxfam. Yet, only 13% of them can proudly claim ownership to the land they work on.

A confluence of factors like lack of legal awareness, scant knowledge of inheritance rights, and years of societal conditioning have worked against Indian women. However, there have been signs of progress as mindsets slowly change for the better. Here is a short guide to understanding women’s rights to property in India.

Inherited property

In 2005, the central government passed a landmark amendment to the Hindu Succession Act of 1956 stipulating that all Indian women have the same rights as their brothers to inherit property.

Now, ancestral property cannot be denied to women any longer as the law classified the daughter as a “coparcener”, a person who gets an equal share of inherited land.

But the laws regarding inheritance of agricultural land are more problematic as it falls under state laws, which differ from state to state. While Andhra Pradesh, for example, has a law that gives women equal inheritance rights over agricultural land, it is not the case in Bihar or Madhya Pradesh.

A daughter’s rights

According to the Hindu Succession Act, an unmarried or married woman is considered to be part of her father’s Hindu Undivided Family (HUF). With the new changes in 2005, the daughter has the right to be the ‘karta’ or manager of the property, which was earlier limited to sons.

In another progressive ruling in 2018, the Supreme Court decreed that a daughter, living or dead, has full rights to her father’s property along with her children.

A woman, who now has rights over her father’s property by birth, is also free to sell her share to a third party or to a coparcenary, which is someone who has joint heirship. However, the coparcenary has the ‘right of first refusal’, to stop the property from going to a non-family member or third party.

Widows have rights too

The Hindu Widow Remarriage Act that was passed by the British in 1856 stated that, “All rights and interests which any widow may have in her deceased husband’s property…shall upon her remarriage cease.” However, this act has long since been repealed and replaced by the Hindu Succession Act.

One of the first rules with regard to widows that the Act introduced was that if a husband dies intestate or without leaving a will behind, then his widow has the right to claim a share of the property along with his immediate kin like mother, daughter, and son.

If a person dies intestate and he has a widowed mother, she too is entitled to get a share of his property along with the rest of kin.

Rights in a second marriage

A woman who chooses to marry for the second time is granted the right to receive a share of her husband’s property by law. Upon her husband’s death, the second wife and her children along with her husband’s wife and children from his previous marriage, if any, are equally entitled to receive a share of the property.