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

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.