Summary : gender and land reforms in Pakistan

The persistence of the power structures governed through land has remained largely unchallenged. This three-page paper provides a succinct overview of land reforms in Pakistan, and includes women’s rights which have typically been absent from the discourse. The question of land rights is assumed to be related to an undifferentiated homogenous category of landless poor peasants, ignoring the power relations and hierarchies within the poor, which place women below men, single women below married women, low caste Hindus below Muslim and etc. The first land reforms under the Provincial Tenancy Act (1950) granted peasants very modest concessions