Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Restructuring the Employment Guarantee Scheme 139
to the rural construction sites. After 27 years of the EGS, for the first time
the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, has specifically
targeted women.
Inheritance and ownership of land are the most critical issues within
the existing personal laws of major religious communities. These regimes
impinge upon the core of women’s status, that is, their access to livelihood
security. Even when changes were made in the Hindu inheritance laws,
these did not automatically become applicable to women from the landowning
class because, under the Indian Constitution, the inheritance of
agricultural land was governed by various state-level tenurial laws that
were gender unequal. The 2005 Amendment to the Hindu Succession
Act made women’s land rights equal to men’s across the states. While
Indian women have the right to work, it has required continuous struggle
to gain the right to ownership and inheritance. The growing phenomenon
of the feminisation of poverty can be attributed to this reality; the fact
that when she is divorced or deserted, she owns nothing except the responsibility
of children. All her labour vested in establishing the home and
providing stability to the family go unrewarded. She is left only with her
constitutional ‘right to work’.
My concern is with how women can gain the ‘right to develop assets
through access to natural resources’. Land rights are a feminist dream,
which may take time to realise. The Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra
had asked its members to donate half an acre of land to be legally recorded
in the wife’s name, which she should be free to cultivate as she wants.
Such gestures are always welcome, but they cannot change the revenue
map of India. However, there are many other ways through which to create
women’s access to land and fulfil their right as citizens to dignified
livelihoods.
BACKGROUND
There is a critical debate raging over whether micro-credit, as proposed
by the World Bank and other international funding agencies, sufficiently
empowers women in the long run or whether it is a diversion from the
demand for land rights and a structural change in the asset-holding
pattern in the country. We need to explore cases where women have indeed