The Context Working Group for Women and Land Ownership, WGWLO is taking the lead in organizing five parallel sessions in collaboration with ILC Asia, Womanity Foundation and Landesa at the India Land & Development Conference, 2025 being held from 18-20th November 2025 at Ahmedabad Management Association in Ahmedabad. These sessions aim to critically reflect on the journey of women’s land rights (WLR) in India, by examining the intersections of gender, caste,class, religion, ethnicity, occupation and age. This reflection will help to address the gaps in feminist land right discourses. WGWLO and AKRSP-I are taking the lead in organising this parallel session “The Case of Tribal and Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups” to bring together voices of women, Tribals and PVTGs. The women’s movement in India has evolved over centuries—shaped by socio-political and economic shifts. From pre-independence grassroots uprisings to present-day global dialogues on climate justice and economic empowerment, women have remained central to transformation. However, women’s access to, control over, and ownership of land—a foundational right—has remained both critical and contested. This session seeks to critically reflect on the journey of Women’s Land Rights (WLR) in India through the intertwined lenses of ethnicity, occupation, and age to address gaps in feminist and land rights discourses: the fragmentation of WLR agendas and their dilution under broader development narratives like economic empowerment, agroecology, and climate change. The sessions finding will serve as a springboard for a more strategic, constituency-rooted WLR agenda in India to co-create a forward-looking vision with the very women at the forefront of land struggles. 

Objectives 

The Objectives of holding these sessions are to

1. Explore the relationship of tribal and PVTG women with land, particularly with the forest and revenue land which the communities inhabit 

2. Understand the factors that strengthen or weaken their rights over land, precisely forest land 

3. Listen to how they face these challenges and what they hope for the future 

4. Learn what ecosystem actors—government, civil society, donors, and researchers—can do to better support their land rights. 

Expected Outcome 

From the changing context of Adivasis inhabiting in forests as a commune to the practices of jhum cultivation to the practice of mutual land boundaries for home-based cultivation to regularizing forest land and community forest land in a given global capitalist and growing climate emergency context, this session will forefront challenges, struggles and successes from across different regions, states, and with varied social identities of women as constituency from tribal and particularly vulnerable tribal groups. The dialogue will be compiled into a Collective Outcome Document for ILDC 2025, outlining key insights and recommendations to support the land rights of these communities. This document will serve as a guide for policymakers, donors, researchers, and civil society actors to develop a clear plan for the next decade