Gender Discrimination in Land Ownership: 11 (Land Reforms in India series) - Hardcover

An impressive volume with rich qualitative and quantitative data has come up, full of useful information and important insights from historical and contemporary trends on the relationship between women, their work and land ownership/disinheritance in the context of emergent patterns of burgeoning capitalists economy, migration, and legal contestations on the matter. Prem Chowdhry provides an able and exhaustive introduction to seemingly varied situations. Some chapters are written by academicians who try to weave several themes together. While other articles, especially by administrators, provide descriptive information on Acts, their amendments, and other quantitative data.... The chapters on Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Punjab give an excellent account of gaps between laws, customs, and practices on the ground level.... The role of civil society organizations in studying, disseminating legal knowledge, and protesting and pushing for change in recent years has also been documented. Most chapters ring out issues of gender discrimination to the fore either through interpretation of Acts or through field studies. They not only provide useful information, but also make suggestions and recommendations for effective implementation. Overall, this book is a useful addition to the growing literature on the subject.

Gender Discrimination in Land Ownership is XIth in the series 'Land Reforms in India', initiated by the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie. The volume contains 14 well-researched chapters through which distinguished scholars look into the discrimination faced by women in various states of India. Highlighting the fact that different regions subject women to varied forms of discrimination, these chapters reveal that these emanate from various customs and practices, Shastric prescriptions and the Muslim personal laws (Shariat) which were crystallized during the British regime and further consolidated in the post-colonial period through various union, state and concurrent laws.

Apart from describing the discrimination that women are subjected to in terms of legal rights, the collection also proposes ways to counter the same and encourages debate on the current Indian socio-legal system. With its two-pronged concern―analysis of reform laws and their impact on gender―this book will be of interest to academics in fields such as development economics, land laws, gender/women studies and sociology, as well as to policy-makers and administrators.