Working Group for Women and Land Ownership, WGWLO and Utthan is taking the lead in organizing five parallel sessions in collaboration with ILC Asia, Landesa and Womanity Foundation 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 UTTHAN are taking the lead in organising this parallel session “Whose Land? Whose Resources? - Intersectional realities & agency of Socially & Economically Excluded Communities” to bring together the voices of underrepresented and excluded women. This discussion will critically reflect on the journey of women’s land and resource rights in India by broadening the discourse by bringing women and communities whose relationships with land and commons remain invisibilized within mainstream development narratives due to their occupations, gender diversity or personal law and practices which define their rights realisation or other forms of resource ownership and use.

The Context Access to and control over land and other common resources are central to livelihood, dignity, and survival for all. Yet, those who depend most closely on these resources - communities marginalized by their gender, sexual orientation, religion, occupation, climate vagaries or an intersecting range of these identities, often remain the least heard and least represented in discussions on resource justice. This panel seeks to foreground the experiences and struggles of socially and economically excluded communities—including transgender persons, Muslim women, saltpan farmers, and coastal fisherfolk —each negotiating their relationship with land and resources within deeply entrenched structures of exclusion due to multiple intersectionality’s. While these communities differ in geography, faith, and occupational systems, their shared experiences reveal how power, kyriarchy and climate change, shape access to land, commons and security of their livelihoods. The panel brings together grassroots leaders, researchers, practitioners, ecosystem actors from across India, to explore how these communities navigate marginalization, assert agency, and carve out spaces of inclusion and resilience. By highlighting lived experiences, grounded struggles and wins, potential for collaborative action and support, the discussion also examines how resource rights intersect with social justice, ecological sustainability, and gender equity. 

Objectives 

The key objectives of these sessions are to: 

1. Explore the relationship of women from socially and economically excluded communities with land and commons 

2. Understand the factors that strengthen or weaken their right to land and commons. 

3. Listen to their challenges, how they face them and their hopes for the future 

4. Learn how ecosystem actors (government, civil society, donors, and researchers) can better support their land rights.