On March 24, the Gujarat Legislative Assembly passed its Uniform Civil Code (UCC). The stated purpose was the same as in Uttarakhand, which passed its own code in February 2024: to give women equal inheritance rights regardless of religion. It is a specific, measurable claim. There is now enough data to test it. Start with the number the debate never uses.
NFHS-5, the National Family Health Survey conducted between 2019 and 2021, found that 31.7 per cent of women aged 15 to 49 own land, either alone or jointly with someone else. For men in the same age group, the figure is 43.9 per cent. That gap of 12.2 percentage points exists in a country where the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act of 2005 already guarantees daughters equal coparcenary rights with sons, where the Indian Succession Act of 1925 gives Christian widows equal inheritance, and where the Special Marriage Act of 1954 routes inheritance through a secular statute for anyone who chooses to marry under it. The legal infrastructure for equal inheritance already exists. The ownership gap persists regardless.
This is the policy problem that neither the Gujarat UCC nor the Uttarakhand UCC addresses. The argument for the code is that law drives outcome. The data says the connection is not that direct.
What the inheritance law already says and does not deliver
Under the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937, a son gets double the share of a daughter wherever they jointly inherit. A Muslim daughter who is the only child receives half of her parent’s estate. If there are two or more daughters and no son, they collectively receive two-thirds. The remaining third goes to more distant male relatives. This is the most cited legal inequality in the UCC debate, and it is real.
But the picture for Hindu women is not what the UCC’s political framing implies. The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act of 2005 did grant daughters equal coparcenary rights by birth and the daughter of a coparcener shall by birth become a coparcener in the same manner as a son, with the same rights in the property as she would have had if she had been a son. The Supreme Court confirmed in Vineeta Sharma vs Rakesh Sharma (2018) that this right applies irrespective of when the daughter was born or whether her father was alive when the amendment came into force.
Twenty years after that amendment, the proportion of women landowners in the 15-49 age group has increased from 28.3 per cent in 2015-16 to just 31.7 per cent in 2019-21. A gain of 3.4 percentage points in five years, for a reform that was supposed to make daughters equal to sons by operation of law. India’s Agricultural Census records only 14 per cent of agricultural land holders as women, according to the Indian School of Public Policy’s analysis of official data. They own roughly 12 per cent of agricultural land by area.
The 2005 amendment did not fail because it was poorly drafted. It failed because the distance between a legal right and an actual inheritance is covered by family pressure, fraud, and the absence of any enforcement mechanism. A large number of fraudulent partitions took place right before state amendments to the Hindu Succession Act were passed, so as to defeat the purpose of the amendment, and no coparcenary property was available to daughters.
The Law Commission’s 174th Report on property rights of women noted this pattern explicitly. The UCC does nothing to address it. Neither the Uttarakhand code nor the Gujarat bill contains a single provision for monitoring whether the equal inheritance it mandates on paper is actually transferred in practice.
The Muslim woman’s inheritance: What the UCC changes and what it does not
The Gujarat UCC, like Uttarakhand’s, mandates equal inheritance shares for sons and daughters across all communities. For a Muslim daughter, this is a statutory improvement over the Shariat Application Act. Under the UCC, she receives an equal share rather than half.
But research by Professor Sylvia Vatuk of the University of Illinois, drawing on interviews conducted in Delhi, documents what actually happens when Muslim women assert inheritance claims in India.
In India, Muslim women rarely obtain the inheritance shares to which they are entitled. When the time comes, they typically either waive their inheritance rights or are prevented by their male co-heirs from accessing them. Those who assert a claim to their shares find themselves vilified by their natal kin and by society at large, as greedy, grasping, selfish, unwomanly and lacking in family feeling.
This is not an argument against equal inheritance law. It is an argument about what determines whether that law operates. The same social dynamics that have kept Hindu women’s land ownership at 31.7 per cent despite a 2005 amendment that was supposed to make them legally equal to their brothers will operate on Muslim women asserting UCC inheritance rights. Changing the statute is the beginning of the process, not the end of it.
The HUF exception and what it reveals
The Gujarat UCC, like Uttarakhand’s, does not touch the Hindu Undivided Family (HUF) structure. This is not a technicality.
A Hindu Undivided Family is a tax entity under the Income Tax Act, 1961 that allows Hindu families to pool ancestral property in a structure that is assessed separately from individual income. The karta i.e the male head of the family, manages the property. Daughters who become coparceners under the 2005 amendment become coparceners in the ancestral property, but the HUF as a legal and tax entity remains intact, managed by the male karta, with no requirement to treat its assets as subject to equal partition unless a female coparcener initiates proceedings.
No other religious community has an equivalent structure under Indian law. Muslims, Christians, and Parsis do not have a statutory tax-advantaged joint family entity. The UCC, by leaving the HUF intact, creates a code that is formally uniform; one law for all but substantively preserves the most significant wealth-consolidation vehicle available exclusively to one community’s male heads of household.
This is not a minor gap in the drafting. It is the same structural asymmetry that the 21st Law Commission identified in its 2018 Consultation Paper when it argued that the problem was not diversity of personal laws but specific discriminatory provisions within them.
A code that equalises inheritance fractions for daughters while leaving untouched the legal architecture through which the largest pools of ancestral wealth are held and managed makes a strong moral claim and a modest material difference.
Uttarakhand: What the data shows
Uttarakhand’s UCC has been in operation for 14 months. The government reported on January 27, 2026, the first anniversary of implementation, that four lakh marriages had been registered on the UCC portal. That is a functioning administrative outcome.
For live-in relationships, the mandatory registration provision produced 162 applications in a year. Of these, 70 were approved. The remaining 92 were rejected for not meeting legal criteria. Each rejection triggers a dispute. Each dispute requires adjudication.
The National Judicial Data Grid recorded 3.5 crore pending cases across India’s district courts as of early 2026. The UCC adds new categories of obligation and new categories of penalty which is a jail term of up to six months for unregistered live-in relationships to a system already operating far beyond its administrative capacity.
The women the Uttarakhand code most visibly targets are Muslim women whose inheritance rights have been equalised on paper. The women most exposed to its surveillance provisions including the mandatory registration, the police notification and the third-party complaint mechanism under Section 386 are young women in consensual relationships outside marriage, for whom the registration record is not a protection but a means by which families and authorities can locate and coerce them.
The Supreme Court, in Indra Sarma vs V.K.V. Sarma (2013), held that live-in relationships deserved legal protection precisely because they fall outside formal marriage, and that the state should protect, not formalise, this space. The Uttarakhand UCC went the other way.
The prior question
The UCC debate in India has always been conducted as if the primary obstacle to women’s equal property rights is the diversity of personal laws. The NFHS-5 data make a different argument. The primary obstacle — the gap between legal right and actual transfer — is a gap that a change in statutory text does not close unless it is accompanied by a functioning enforcement system, a literate and informed rights-holder, courts with the capacity to hear disputes, and family structures that do not punish women for asserting what the law now says is theirs.
The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act of 2005 is the test case. It is by any measure a more targeted reform than the UCC. It applied equal coparcenary rights directly to the community with the largest property pool, without requiring a new code or a new enforcement bureaucracy. Two decades later, women owned 31.7 per cent of land versus men’s 43.9 per cent, 14 per cent of agricultural holdings, and roughly 12 per cent of agricultural land by area.
That is not an argument for abandoning the UCC.
It is an argument for being precise about what the UCC actually changes and what it does not. Equal inheritance fractions in a statute, without enforcement infrastructure, legal aid, and court capacity, will deliver for women with lawyers and money and families who are willing to litigate.
For the women in whose name the argument is always made — the rural Muslim daughter, the Hindu woman whose family conducted a fraudulent partition in 2004 to defeat the amendment before it came into force — the statute is a beginning. The distance between that beginning and an actual piece of land in her name is covered not by legislation but by everything that legislation cannot do.
