Land, a predominant physical reality of the Nepali society, is one of the basics that plays a pivotal role in shaping social relations and power structure. Land in Nepal has served as a significant means of meeting both social and economic ends. The land is associated not only with the organisation of economic life of people, alleviation of poverty, hunger and management of livelihood of them. It is also a powerful means to settle the social life of the landless or land-poor people with equality and justice in case the distribution of it is fair and equitable.
In Nepal, landlessness is deeply rooted in a long history of feudal land governance, political complacency and nepotism. A skewed distribution of land and its severe impact on the socio-economic and political life of landless people led them to have various land rights movement over many decades. The movements of the land-poor people in Nepal must be understood in terms of disparities in land ownership. The seed of the movement had been sowed by the feudalistic socio-political organisation and its so-called land tenure system.
Land rights movement in Nepal since 1800 till date is an explosion of latent discontentment of the landless groups against the historical tenure policy and so-called measures of reformation adopted over time regarding land issues. The discontentment of landless tenants, marginal/excluded groups such as Dalits, bonded labourers, indigenous groups, and women exploded in the form of land rights movement in the different historical timeline. They took place in different spatio-temporal contexts. These movements represent the larger grievances of the land-deprived and land-poor groups in Nepal over the land policies and tenure system enforced by the so-called state.