‘Women get fewer chances to buy assets'

There are wide disparities in the asset ownership by men and women in the State.

Not only did women own fewer assets, but also of lesser value and of poorer quality.

The Karnataka Household Asset Survey 2011 – conducted by the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore – reveals that women have far fewer opportunities for asset accumulation as compared to men

Although there are laws that allow daughters to inherit equally as sons, inheritance patterns continue to be biased in favour of men. The survey studied the patterns of asset ownership by men and women and to what extent they have rights over their assets.

It also studied the main channels of asset acquisition for men and women.

KHAS covered 4,110 households, of which 64 per cent was rural, 27 per cent was urban and nine per cent from Bangalore. From the sampled households, 7,185 individuals were interviewed.

Ownership by men

The study found that individual ownership by men was the dominant form of ownership for key productive assets such as residence, agricultural land and other real estate, and for non-farm businesses and most financial assets.

In rural areas, 71 per cent of all plots were owned individually by men, while only 14 per cent were owned by women individually. It was not very different in urban areas: Nearly 60 per cent of non-farm business activities were owned individually by men and 22 per cent of the same were individually owned by women.

Asset class

Under different asset class, about 47 per cent of adult men in rural areas owned residences, while this held true for only 17 per cent of adult women there.

The gap was lowest in Bangalore with 16 per cent and 10 per cent home ownership rate for men and women, respectively.

The chief mode of acquisition of residence and agricultural land for men was through inheritance from their natal families, while for women it was through marriage.

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