Land Economy Research Seminar: 'Do courts grant Indian women their inheritance claims?'

Speaker: Bina Agarwal (University of Manchester)

Abstract: Despite inheritance law reform towards gender equality in India, families rarely transfer immovable property to women. Given this, do women use courts to claim their rights? If so, who opposes them? What kind of property is disputed? How long do cases take? To what extent do judgements favour women, and what does the language of judgements reveal? No prior study has addressed these questions.

Bridging economics and law, this talk will do so, based on pioneering research that innovatively uses online case law data to probe High court judgements delivered across India over fifteen years, 2005-2020. This is the first paper of its kind to do so. It arrives at some unexpected findings.

Speaker info: Bina Agarwal is Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the GDI, University of Manchester, UK. She was earlier Director and Professor, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, where she is still affiliated. She has been President, International Society for Ecological Economics; President, IAFFE; Vice President, International Economic Association; and held distinguished positions at Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, among other universities. She is an honorary fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.

Her research covers agriculture, environmental governance, property rights, gender inequality, and law. Her notable books include the award-winning, A Field of One’s Own (CUP 1994); Gender and Green Governance (OUP, 2010); and Gender Challenges (OUP, 2016), a three volume compendium of her selected papers. Her work on women’s land rights and on environmental governance has had global impact. Agarwal’s many awards include a Padma Shri in 2008, from the President of India; three book prizes; the 2010 Leontief Prize ‘for advancing the frontiers of economic thought’; 2017 Louis Malassis International Scientist Prize, France, for agricultural economics; International Balzan Prize 2017 for gender studies; the Kenneth Boulding award in Ecological Economics 2023, and the first Global Inequality Research Award, 2024, France.