Shakti beams with pride as she

Shakti beams with pride as she
holds her patta – the title to her land.
Before she became a landowner, she almost
never smiled. Shakti was among the poorest
of the poor, a landless laborer earning only $1
a day and – struggling to provide even one
meal a day for her family. In her rural village
in the Chitoor district in Andhra Pradesh, she
had few options. She worked as a seasonal
agricultural laborer, when work was available.
When it wasn’t, she worked as a stone crusher,
a physically exhausting and dangerous job.
She owned only one sari and could only
afford to feed her children rice gruel. When
Shakti attained secure land rights, all of
that changed.
In partnership with the Andhra Pradesh
government and the World Bank, RDI designed
a land purchase program that works like microlending.
Qualifying small self-help groups of the
poorest villagers – mainly women – are eligible
to receive government grants to finance
purchases of land available on the market.
Shakti and other landless women in her village
applied collectively for a loan to buy a plot of
land. With assistance from local paralegals,
the women negotiated with sellers and split the
land parcels among themselves.
For women in India, land rights can mean the
difference between a life of grinding poverty
and a life of opportunity. Without secure rights
or access to land, women must depend on
men for their physical well-being, economic
stability, and social status. If a woman’s
relationships with the men in her life terminate,
she has no safety net. She will not inherit a
portion of the family land given to her brothers
when her father dies. She will not be given
a share of land when she marries. She will
have no place in her husband’s village and is
not welcomed back in her natal home if her
husband abandons or divorces her. She may
be separated from her children, deprived of
food and shelter and left destitute.
It is an impossible choice: security of shelter
and basic welfare often carries the price of
continued abuse, while leaving usually means
abandoning her children and migrating to
cities to join thousands of others who beg in the
streets or turn to prostitution to survive.
Secure land rights provided Shakti with the
foundation she needed to lift herself from the
crushing poverty of day-to-day survival and
created options for her entire family. She has
new status in her village and in her home. She
has control over the income from the land, and
can now provide three meals a day with vital
micro-nutrients for her children. Even better,
Shakti can now afford to send her children to
school and give them a brighter future
of opportunity.
“Namma bhoomi,” says Shakti, pointing to the
fields behind her. Her daughter, now literate
and fluent in English translates. “This is our land.”
For Shakti and her family, a little land went a