CRITICAL AND COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF DISPARITY IN PROPERTY RIGHTS OF WOMEN IN INDIA

Abstract

This paper undertakes a critical and comparative analysis of the disparity in women’s property rights in India across religious personal laws, statutory frameworks, and evolving constitutional jurisprudence. It interrogates doctrinal tensions between the formal equality promised by the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 and uneven outcomes produced by precedent, administrative practice, and social norms; it contrasts these with the gender-differentiated inheritance rules under Muslim law and the comparatively gender-neutral regimes governing Christians and Parsis, while also engaging with customary practices among Scheduled Tribes. Conceptually, the paper synthesizes legal-doctrinal review with socio-legal evidence on enforcement, showing how judicial clarification of coparcenary rights has advanced de jure equality but remains mediated by access to courts, documentary title, and digitized land records. It highlights the role of apex court decisions in harmonizing precedent on daughters’ coparcenary status and inheritance of self-acquired property, and evaluates empirical findings on women’s recourse to litigation and the administrative frictions of recordation and mutation. The analysis situates India’s trajectory within contemporary comparative benchmarks on “assets” and property regimes, arguing that formal reforms must be coupled with record modernization, presumptive joint titling, gender-responsive stamp duty design, and grievance redress to meaningfully reduce gendered gaps in ownership and control. The paper concludes that the persistence of disparity is not merely a matter of doctrinal incompleteness but of implementation capacity, data infrastructure, and norm change, calling for a coordinated program of legal consolidation, cadastral reform, and targeted incentives aligned with constitutional commitments to equality and non-discrimination.