PPLA holds kickoff meeting

On 20th December, the project held its formal kick off meeting ahead of the commencement of fieldwork. In the meeting, the international project team presented the fieldwork plan to both the research team and project advisers for feedback. Fatima Ahmed and Mita Rahman were able to share experiences from the field, and the broader context of the agrarian issue in Bangladesh, based on Uttaran’s many years of land programming.

Discussion quickly came to focus on the highly gendered aspect of land rights in Bangladesh. Project adviser Dr Samina Luthfa of Dhaka University clarified that the specific land intervention under analysis was operating under the constraints of personal inheritance law under the national framework.

Both Muslim and Hindu inheritance law is highly inequitable, with Hindu women in particular not having any legal claim at all to inherit land.

Dr Luthfa recommended that the plight of Hindu women should be a focus of the project, as Hindus in general are also a highly marginalised minority in Bangladesh, and victims of continuing problems relating to the Vested Property Act.

Therefore Hindu women are subject to a complex intersectional combination of exclusion, both from within their own community and then within the State in general. This recommendation was enthusiastically adopted by the international project team.

After some more discussion about various logistical issues, the meeting concluded with warm wishes for the research team, and best of luck for fieldwork.