Landed women

EAR TO THE GROUND

In an Andhra Pradesh district, women's groups take land on lease; a Plan panel group takes note of this and asks the government to encourage group ownership and group leases for women.

Women in villages rarely have the good fortune of owning land.

But this might change, courtesy a small movement building up in Andhra Pradesh's Medak district where social workers have convinced women in some villages to take land on lease from their husbands.

The women grow crops of their choice. The millets we grow taste better, they say. At least the earnings, howsoever meagre, are assured.

The women have realised this. So have activists like Rukmini Rao and the central government. The experiment, by Rao's friends in the Deccan Development Society and some associate organisations in Medak, may now find a place in the Eleventh Five-Year Plan.

The Planning Commission's working group on women empowerment, of which Rao is a member, has recommended that the government encourage group ownership and group leases for women. The move will instantly empower rural women, the group's report says.

The report says direct land transfers should provide individual titles, rather than joint titles with husbands. It says a joint title gives a woman little control over the produce and makes it difficult for her to claim her share in case of a split with her husband.

It adds that the government should assist groups of women to collectively buy or take on lease cultivable land from the market. The lease, it says, can be for long periods of up to 20 years. It also proposes that the government provide loans for this.

The group says this can give a much-deserved push to the movement, which is already attracting large followers. In Orissa's Kalahandi district, for example, self-help women groups are being encouraged by district authorities to take land on lease and grow pulses and vegetables.

In the Junagarh block, women belonging to self-help groups are enthusiastic about the vegetables grown on the land taken on lease jointly.

The returns, of course, are not much. For, the only marketing outlet is a tribal weekly market at the block level, which does not get them the price pulses would get in the bigger world outside Kalahandi.

"We get about Rs 15 a kg for arhar," said a women who is part of one such group. In another village, the women are proud owners of a pond which has been leased out to them by the district administration.