Abstract
In the late 1970s and early 1990s, five South Indian states legislatively amended the
1956 Hindu Succession Act or established a new act at the state level. These Hindu succession
amendments, which pertained to Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, granted women
the right to inherit joint family property, such as agricultural land and ancestral homes.
This paper discusses the correlation between these inheritance reforms and the changing
educational attainments of Hindu women in India. It assumes that these inheritance reforms
altered the framework of intergenerational transmission in household resources,
such as material and human capital. Using four-period data from India’s National Family
Health Survey（NFHS）, this paper examines the correlation between inheritance reforms
and education levels. The results show that Hindu daughters of household heads who own
land in the states where inheritance reforms have been enforced benefit from acquiring
education and reading newspapers and magazines. The paper also creates a placebo for
the same nonreligious conditions, which is compiled from the NFHS with regard to Muslim
and Christian daughters, who are not subject to the Hindu Succession Act. The study uses
the placebo for a robustness check. These women showed no significant increase in educational
level.
