Who owns the land

Agricultural land in Punjab is held overwhelmingly by men and overwhelmingly by the dominant cultivating castes.

Women's legal entitlement under the Hindu Succession Act as amended in 2005 is equal. Their actual holding is a small fraction, because daughters routinely sign relinquishment deeds in favour of brothers and because a woman who does not is understood to have damaged the family.

Dalit households, about a third of Punjab's population, hold a very small share of its agricultural land, which is why the shamlat common land reservation matters so much and is fought over village by village.

Tenancy is mostly informal. A tenant with no recorded tenancy has no claim and no access to institutional credit, which is why the muzara movement in the 1940s was about getting names into the record.

Punjab's land records are digitised and public, which means the distribution could be analysed by anyone with the patience to do it.

Nobody has published that analysis, and it would be the single most informative document about Punjabi society that exists.

Land in Punjab is held overwhelmingly by men. Inheritance law gives daughters an equal share and the practice is that they sign it away to their brothers.

The signing is done at the time of marriage or shortly after and is presented as the counterpart of the daaj. It is voluntary in law and is not in practice.

The consequence is that a very large share of Punjabi women own nothing, in a state where land is the only collateral and the only security anybody has.

What we don't know

  • The full distribution of Punjab's agricultural land by caste and sex. The data exists and has not been analysed.

Where to check this

  1. Punjab land records and agricultural census data. Census of India 2011 - Punjab district census handbooks ↗

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Hindu Succession Act as amended.
  • Research on land distribution in Punjab.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 220 accounts in When the Water Went, the chapter of this site covering Punjab since 1947: land, water, debt and everything after.