GDI Lecture: Do Courts Grant Indian Women Their Inheritance Claims?
| Dates: | 19 February 2025 |
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| Times: | 16:30 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Lecture |
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| Organiser: | Global Development Institute |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Adults, Current University students, General public |
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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 by Professor Bina Agarwal will do so, based on her pioneering research (co-authored with Shruthi Naik) 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.
Bina Agarwal is Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the GDI, University of Manchester. She was earlier Director and Professor, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, where she is still affiliated.Her research covers agrarian change, environmental governance, property rights, gender inequality, and law. Among her notable books are 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. Agarwal’s many awards include a Padma Shri in 2008, from the President of India; three book prizes; the 2010 Leontief Prize, USA; the 2017 Louis Malassis International Scientist Prize, France, for agricultural economics; the International Balzan Prize 2017 for gender studies; the Kenneth Boulding award in Ecological Economics 2023, and the first Global Inequality Research Award, 2024, France.
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