The Hindu Succession Amendment Act and Education of Hindu Women in India :

An Analysis Using the National Family Health Survey

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.