Direct benefit transfer for women: Key task for Delhi's new CM Atishi

In the last few weeks, for the on-going Assembly elections in J&K and in Haryana, all the major political parties in the fray have announced monthly allowances for women

With less than five month left for the Delhi Assembly polls, rolling out the monthly direct benefit transfer for the city’s women would be a key task for Atishi, who took oath as Delhi’s chief minister on Saturday.

As Delhi’s finance minister, Atishi announced the scheme in March, when she tabled the state government’s 2024-25 Budget.

When implemented, possibly in October, Delhi will join a growing list of states that have since 2020 implemented similar schemes entailing cash transfers to women.

In the last few weeks, for the ongoing Assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir and in Haryana, scheduled to vote on October 5, all the major political parties in the fray have announced monthly allowances for women. The governments in two other poll-bound states, Maharashtra and Jharkhand, also launched such schemes in recent weeks.

There is electoral arithmetic involved for political parties to increasingly think of women, at least in some states, as distinct vote banks, and deliver on women-centric schemes. The women’s voter turnout has matched or has been better than men’s in at least a dozen states since 2009. With improving gender ratios, the female electorate is in greater numbers than men in several states. According to SBI Research, there will be more women than men voting in the 2029 Lok Sabha elections.

In the runup to the Odisha Assembly polls, the BJP disrupted the support base among women that the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) enjoyed by committing to roll out its Subhadra Yojana.

 

For over two decades, the Naveen Patnaik-led BJD had found support among women through its Mission Shakti scheme. Under the scheme, more than seven million women have formed over 600,000 self-help groups (SHGs). “But Mission Shakti’s beneficiaries were older women, while Subhadra Yojana promised cash transfers to all women above 18 in these households, splitting Patnaik’s support base,” an Odisha-based political observer said.

The importance of such schemes was evident during the Lok Sabha campaigning in West Bengal, where Union Home Minister Amit Shah clarified the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would not scrap the Lakshmir Bhandar scheme, launched by the Mamata Banerjee-led government in 2021. He said the BJP would increase the scheme’s allowance by Rs 100.

Beyond electoral arithmetic, research has shown these schemes have had behavioural and economic spinoffs. The Pratichi Trust, which Nobel laureate Amartya Sen chairs, found that Lakshmir Bhandar increased women’s ability to make financial decisions and enhanced their position within the family.

In December 2023, SBI Research analysed the BJP’s Madhya Pradesh Assembly win, which was attributed to its Ladli Behna Scheme (LBS), launched four months before the elections. SBI Research’s survey found that beneficiaries of the scheme increased their spending at merchant outlets by at least Rs 9,302 as against non-beneficiaries from the time the scheme was launched. The study found spending by non-beneficiaries was primarily towards basic amenities, while the spending pattern of the beneficiaries “are more on consumerist avenues”.

According to Axis Bank research, published in July, income transfers to women now total Rs 1.8 trillion a year, or 0.8 per cent the combined gross state domestic product (GSDP) of the 10 states it analysed, including Maharashtra. It said the schemes in these 10 states covered 11.1 million women, or 16 per cent of Indian women. The analysis didn’t cover Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha, which have also launched their respective women’s welfare schemes.

The Axis Bank report said if states did not cut their capital expenditure, their expenditure on these schemes, which have lower administrative costs, made state-level welfare spending more efficient.