Across the developing world the way in which land is controlled and managed has been steadily changing. In the past fifty years, community ownership has increasingly given way to privatization. The impact of this change on social equity and on the environment is a key issue that interests conservationists and politicians alike.
In late March, Indian Premier Narendra Modi imposed a three-week lockdown to prevent the further spread of the coronavirus. Since then, tens of thousands of migrant workers who had previously provided cheap labour in wealthy homes or on construction sites in the nation’s growing metropolises have been making their way back to their rural home regions.
March 2014 – In 2012, Landesa and the government of West Bengal, India, entered an innovative partnership aimed at using land to reduce risks facing rural adolescent girls, including poverty, malnutrition, lack of education, and early marriage. This paper addresses pilot project features including girls groups, peer leader methodologies, community engagement, a land rights and land-based livelihoods curriculum, and partnerships with government stakeholders.
March 2014 – This paper critically examines how lease farming can be a viable livelihood option for landless rural poor, especially women in India. In the absence of land ownership and education, the majority of landless and semi-landless rural women are engaged as low wage agricultural labourers and remain trapped in poverty and indebtedness. Lease farming by landless women in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh shows a pathway for reducing their poverty and enabling upward social mobility.
March 2014 – Odisha, a state on the eastern coast of India, has endeavored over the years to enact laws aimed at providing land to those cultivating it and redistributing ownership of land. Landesa designed and piloted a model where a local youth (called a Community Resource Person) – identified by the community – is trained to provide additional capacity to local government land administration officials to identify and provide title to the formerly landless families. This model was subsequently scaled to cover 1,042 villages in seven districts of the state.
Citizenship is an abstract concept and therefore great care must be taken in explaining what it means in practice and what can effectively be done in the context of development interventions and policy. Development projects which enhance the ability of marginalised groups to access and influence decision-making bodies are implicitly if not explicitly working with concepts of citizenship. Citizenship is about concrete institutions, policy and structures and the ways in which people can shape them using ideas of rights and participation.
Climate change is increasingly being recognised as a global crisis, but responses to it have so far been overly focused on scientific and economic solutions. How then do we move towards morepeople-centred, gender-aware climate change policies and processes? How do we respond to the different needs and concerns of women and men, and also challenge the gender inequalities that mean women are more likely to lose out than men in the face of climate change? This In Brief sets out why it is vital to address the gender dimensions of climate change.
March 2014 – Inheritance is the overwhelming way land is acquired in India, but societal practices exclude women from inheriting land. The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005, an inheritance law that covers 83.6% of the population of India, corrected some fundamental inequalities in the law bringing the women in equal status to men in the right to inherit land. However, eight years after its enactment, the ground reality is that women still do not inherit land on an equal basis with men.
Demand for organic basmati rice (OBR), both at home and abroad, coupled with policy reforms in India have given rise to contract farming (CF) production in that nation. OBR production, however, is highly susceptible to weather and pest risks. This study investigates the impact of smallholders’ perceived production risks on their adoption of CF in OBR farming. We also assess the impact of CF in OBR production on yields, prices received, and the livelihood of OBR producers.
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