Land Reforms and Beyond
University’s Research Exchange Forum, hosted in collaboration with the Centre for Integral Economics, welcomed Dr. Shubho Roy of Shiv Nadar University’s School of Law for its fortieth session on 8th January 2026 at the Vindhya Boardroom. Trained at the University of Chicago and a former clerk to a Supreme Court judge, Dr. Roy brought the sharp lens of law and public choice theory to one of demography’s most disturbing puzzles.
His paper offered a bold new explanation for the estimated 126 million missing women globally. While prevailing scholarship has attributed son preference to patriarchy, cultural norms, or capitalism, Dr. Roy argued that none of these adequately account for cross-country patterns. His thesis locates the cause in land-to-the-tiller reform programmes rolled out across the developing world in the latter twentieth century. By placing legal restrictions on the transfer and leasing of redistributed agricultural land, these reforms created a structural economic incentive to prefer male heirs capable of retaining land ownership. Cross-country data presented in the session revealed a striking temporal correlation between the implementation of such reforms and deteriorating sex ratios at birth, with comparable nations that avoided these reforms showing no equivalent trend.
