Win for daughters: But more needed to ensure women’s property rights

In another win for women’s right to inheritance of property, the Supreme Court has ruled that daughters will have equal rights to their father’s property even prior to the enactment of the Hindu Succession Act (HSA) of 1956. In fact, it clarified that if a property of a male Hindu dying intestate is a self-acquired property or obtained in partition of a coparcenary or family property, the same would devolve by inheritance to daughters, and not by survivorship as was the case before 1956. The apex court has been progressively interpreting the 2005 amendment to the HSA and in 2020 clarified that daughters had coparcenary rights by birth.

In a country where women face massive social and legal hurdles to inheritance, this is a big win. Thanks to deep patriarchal mores and rural-agrarian settings, property, which is seen as a primary source of wealth, is largely inclined to be passed on to male heirs. This in turn deprives women of agency, financial independence and entrepreneurship. True, the recently released National Family Health Survey-5 says that 43% of women respondents reported owning house/land alone or jointly. But doubts remain about women’s ability to actually access and control property. In fact, a 2020 University of Manchester working paper found barely 16% of women in rural landowning households own land.

Plus, inheritance laws for agricultural land remain a minefield with conflicting central personal laws and state laws. In this regard, states such as Punjab, Haryana, UP and even Delhi have regressive inheritance provisions. In fact, Haryana twice tried to take away the progressive rights given to women through HSA, while in UP since 2016 married daughters aren’t considered primary heirs. Add to this ground-level resistance to registering land for women in several north Indian states. Thus, women’s empowerment and property rights remain an unfinished project.