Gender and Land Tenure Security: Challenges and Barriers to Women’s Entitlement to Land in India

Given the importance of securing women’s rights to land as India grows and develops and recognizing the dearth of available data to guide the design of gender-sensitive interventions, this study provides quantitative insights into a number of conditions that currently hamper rural women’s land rights. The study seeks to understand women’s land rights by documenting how women acquire land, their feelings about tenure security to that land, exploring their knowledge of their land rights, and the extent to which they would like to and expect to gain access to family land through inheritance. The results discussed in the study are based on a survey conducted in September and October of 2011 with 504 women in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar.