The anti-female kink of agricultural ceiling laws: rewriting the Supreme Court’s Ambika Prasad judgment

Women make up 64% of the agricultural workforce but own only 14% of rural agricultural land in India. This is a key feminist concern as land ownership is tied to many socio-economic outcomes. Further exacerbating this disparity are ceiling laws that govern ownership of agricultural land in states and provide for unequal gender-based ownership rights. Yet Indian feminist legal scholarship has failed to interrogate these laws. We address this by investigating the Uttar Pradesh Imposition of Ceiling on Land Holdings Act 1960, which systematically excludes daughters from land ownership. When it was challenged in Ambika Prasad v State of Uttar Pradesh, the Supreme Court reinforced the law’s in-built gender discrimination, finding that the “anti-female” kink of the law did not “abridge, even a wee-bit the rights of women”. Rewriting the Supreme Court’s judgement from a feminist perspective, we argue that even with the legal precedent and jurisprudence available at the time, a gender-just outcome was possible.