In Jharkhand, eastern India, women are not entitled to own land and accusations of witchcraft are wielded against them to silence their claims to land.
2020 was a tough year on many fronts, and land rights were no exception. COVID-19 hindered land rights advocates from doing field research, meeting with government officials, prioritizing policy initiatives, and obtaining funding. Despite these headwinds, we have seen important advances, and the field continues to grow. Here are eight breakthroughs in 2020 to celebrate.
To mark International Human Rights Day, Landesa's Tizai Mauto and women's land rights & gender expert Grace Ananda explore a few of the most pernicious inequalities to surface from the COVID-19 pandemic, and a common challenge they share: insecure rights to land.
Closing a data gap may seem technocratic and boring. But the social and economic empowerment prospects of more than one billion largely poor women who lack secure, legal land and property rights hinges on the success of these efforts.
The ideal of a married woman decorated with sindoor, sakha, and bichiya is romanticized through legend and folklore; steeped in this culture, women themselves see value in these rituals. Millions of women in India do not even imagine that these discriminatory and patriarchal rituals are not supernaturally ordained and blind them to the reality that the revered status given to suhagins causes untold suffering to any woman (widow) who does not fit the ideal.