Securing Land Rights For Women through Institutional and Policy Reforms

Rural women suffer double discrimination because they are female and poor. Though women are the biggest food producers, they earn only one-tenth of the world’s income and own less than 1% of the world’s land. The Government of India has tried to provide land to women, but with limited results. The Government of Odisha, with the support of Landesa, developed a pilot program to identify vulnerable landless women and provide them with secure rights to land. The government and Landesa designed a pilot operating from the sub-district land administration office to implement a village household inventory identifying single women such as widows and abandoned women. The pilot also developed the capacities of government officials involved in implementation. As a result of the pilot, the government identified several legal and procedural hurdles to ensuring single women could access land of their own. The pilot has now been scaled to the entire district where out of 300,000 households, close to 15% will be eligible to get land from the government. Considering how this innovative pilot is shaping, the government is keen to scale it further to the entire state, which would mean close to 500,000 single women would get land.