In the vast, poor province of Uttar Pradesh, women are campaigning to change the laws governing farmland ownership, writes RAHUL BEDIIn Deramunchi, Uttar Pradesh
A QUIET but vibrant movement to empower women farmers is gradually making progress across northern India’s largest and poorest province, the inadequately governed Uttar Pradesh (UP).
The Aroh (Ascending) campaign, launched four years ago by the Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group (GEAG), a non-governmental organisation aided by Oxfam, aims to confirm family land ownership entitlement on women farmers despite the aggressive and uncompromising male milieu of the predominantly agrarian province.
The right to land ownership, basic to most progressive societies, remains proscribed across India and particularly UP, constrained by inheritance legislation and anti-female statutes.
Matters are complicated by widespread corruption and poverty; illiteracy; caste and communal rivalries; and a burgeoning population, expected to rise to 440 million by 2051.
By mobilising small and marginal women farmers, GEAG activists have partly overcome ingrained institutional and societal conservatism and expanded their movement to all 71 of the enormous province’s administrative districts.
Though the GEAG is still far from securing land ownership rights in the state for females through legislative fiat, it has achieved incremental changes that have helped ameliorate the situation of UP’s women farmers.
By means of lobbying, the GEAG and Oxfam have won minor amendments to UP’s Zamindari (landlord) Abolition and Land Reforms Act of 1950, which provided agricultural land inheritance rights only to female offspring but not co-ownership to wives.
Enacted three years after India achieved independence from colonial rule, the act, intended to trim large, feudal landholdings, ended up restricting the inheritance of agricultural land to males, depriving not only daughters and other female descendants of any share, but also wives and widows.
GEAG advocacy persuaded the state administration in the provincial capital, Lucknow, to reduce by a quarter the exorbitant registration fee charged for transferring agricultural property to women, however rare the occurrence.
More significantly, Oxfam and the GEAG persuaded more than 8,000 male farmers across UP to participate in a signature campaign declaring their willingness to make their spouses joint land owners.
“By all accounts this was a remarkable achievement in this exceedingly conservative region and a first, positive step towards women securing additional land rights in UP,” said Neelam Prabhat of the GEAG in Deramunshi village, some 120 km northeast of Lucknow.
Though UP is India’s largest state – with a population of nearly 200 million, it would be the world’s fifth-largest country if it was independent – it is also among the country’s least developed and socially most backward areas, particularly with regard to women, many of whom are deprived of basic rights and routinely maltreated.
Surveys by numerous social organisations have shown domestic violence against women in UP, particularly in rural areas, is widespread, viewed as a women’s due and her husband’s right.
In such medieval conditions, securing even marginal legal rights for women is impressive.
“Our greatest achievement so far has been the ability to spawn an attitudinal change in UP’s hidebound, male-dominated society by convincing it that women farmers, denied their rights for decades, also had an abiding and equal equity stake in agricultural holdings,” Prabhat said.
She said activists encouraged women throughout UP to conduct padyartas(marches) in villages and small towns and to petition officials to acknowledge their land rights.
The 1991 census showed about 72 per cent of UP’s population was involved in agriculture. More than 75 per cent of women, who comprise 48.5 per cent of the province’s population, were engaged in farming and associated endeavours.
Despite this, women in UP, as elsewhere in India, had no legal co-ownership rights over land. According to an Oxfam-sponsored study, just 6 per cent of UP women owned land in their own right, while the rate of joint ownership of land by women was just 3 per cent.
Women farmers were even forbidden from using the traditional plough, as local folklore held that all such activity displeased the gods and triggered drought and famine.
Consequently, two years ago, Lalla, a 45-year-old low-caste or Dalit widow of Deramunshi, who uses only one name, began ploughing her smallholding on the edge of the village surreptitiously, late at night, for fear of being caught and punished.
Her clandestine activity, to grow food for herself and her two children, was eventually exposed. She faced the wrath of the male-dominated village council, while other enraged locals even tried to burn her house.
Aroh campaigners took up her case and in time she was joined in her efforts by about a dozen other women in similar situations, all determined to establish their status as farmers.
Mindful of local customs, Aroh activists educated the women farmers about their rights under existing laws.
In addition, they skilfully persuaded men in the relevant villages of the economic value of having women tilling the land, and of the need to dignify their lowly status in order to enhance the prosperity of their communities.
Sahrulnissa Ali is another Deramunshi wife and a mother of 12 who first participated in an Aroh campaign in 2008 by marching through her village for increased rights for women farmers.
Supported by other locals, she embarked on an extended stand-off with her village council and district authorities, eventually preventing her husband from selling their small plot of land and leaving her destitute.
“Aroh has taught us not to be scared of our menfolk and to demand our rights, which I know we will ultimately secure,” she said.
Even recalcitrant district officials who had previously treated the women protesters with contempt were slowly coming to accept many of their proposals, she added.
“Since we became aware of our rights through Aroh, our lives have changed remarkably,” said Raj Kumari Maurya, a woman farmer who, along with other women in her village, had succeeded in opening a joint bank accounts with her husband, something previously unheard of.
In time, she said, the term “farmer” will be redefined legally to include women.