On the campaign trail for the Madhya Pradesh assembly election, incumbent Chief Minister Shivraj Chouhan was asked which of his schemes appealed to voters the most. He listed a host of schemes for women, with the Ladli Behna Yojana at the top. When this scheme was introduced in March 2023, it gave a monthly stipend of Rs 1,000 to women aged between 23 and 60 in households with an annual income of less than Rs 2.5 lakh. In the run-up to the election, this amount was increased to Rs 1,250 and the minimum age was reduced to 21. Reports on the BJP’s extraordinary victory margin in the election validated the image of Chouhan as ‘Mamaji’. They also placed this scheme as the top factor that enabled the party to mop up what appeared to be unsurmountable anti-incumbency sentiments after nearly two decades of BJP rule.
In an article published in the journal Antipode, geographer Tara Cookson examines a conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme in Peru called Juntos. The scheme provides cash payments of 200 soles every two months to mothers who meet the following conditions. One, children’s regular school attendance up to 18 years of age or graduation; two, children’s regular attendance at growth and nutrition check-ups until five years of age; and three, pregnant women’s regular attendance at prenatal care. By placing the burden of “inclusive development” exclusively on women, CCTs like Juntos, Cookson observes, obfuscate how the “work” of fulfilling conditionalities reproduces exclusionary development. According to the researcher, a major part of women’s work in Juntos involved “interacting with unreliable and poor quality services.”
Big CCTs, small effects
Replace Juntos with a programme like the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) in India, with the associated conditionalities, and we have the contours of an explanation for the electoral success of LBY. The JSY, which was launched in 2005, is one of the largest CCTs in the world and provides cash assistance to mothers and community health workers to incentivise institutionalised births, and by extension, reduce maternal mortality. Using data from the Sample Registration System (SRS) from 2005-2010 and the Annual Health Survey of 2011, one econometric study noted that while the JSY had increased institutionalised births, it had no effect on maternal mortality. The study attributed this to the low quality of care provided at these institutions, a finding in line with what Cookson had observed in Peru.
Incidentally, the JSY was upgraded in 2010 with a second-generation CCT. Originally christened as the Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahyog Yojana and renamed Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana in 2017, the upgrade sought to incentivise a broader range of healthy behaviours around the time of birth and featured a number of training programmes, including for family planning.
A recent study assessing the effect of the upgrades using nationally representative data finds some positive direct and indirect effects but concludes that the effect sizes are small and “can make only a small contribution to redressing India’s dismal maternal and child health record”.
Cookson further observes that over and above the poor quality of services that beneficiaries had to contend with, getting access to Juntos also involved “a significant amount of time walking and waiting; over muddy footpaths, in the rain and sun, in municipal halls and banks and clinics”. This was because the programme “does not make allowances for weather conditions that make women’s travel uncomfortable, difficult, or burdensome”. Worse still, even after wading through these spatial inequalities, payment could be denied due to circumstances — one beneficiary experienced it when she forgot her national identity document.
Also read: Vishnu Deo Sai is new Chhattisgarh CM. What’s behind Modi-Shah’s push for fresh faces…
Way out of the Gordian knot
During a recent field visit to rural Udaipur in Rajasthan to observe a social security facilitation camp organised by a top NGO, I was struck by how most of the attendees were those who had been hollowed out by the labour of “waiting and walking”. An elderly woman was at the facilitation camp because she had been mistakenly issued an Above Poverty Line (APL) card, which reduced her share of food items provided under the Public Distribution System (PDS). She was there to check whether her name was in a list of PDS users who had appealed to the local administration via the NGO to be recategorised as Below Poverty Line (BPL). As I moved around the various workstations to observe how the organisers interacted with the attendees, I noticed that the busiest counter was the one that had been set up to help attendees resolve discrepancies in payment for work done under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA).
It is easy to see — through the lens of Cookson’s thesis — why unconditional cash transfer schemes such as the LBY or the Kalaignar Magalir Urimai Thittam in Tamil Nadu have become so popular with female voters. To put it simply, they offer a way out of the Gordian knot of conditionalities associated with CCTs that add to the already disproportionate burden of unpaid work women do at home, with limited time for self-care.
There is little doubt that the BJP’s remarkable victory in MP has significantly improved the party’s odds in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. However, the party would do well to recognise the pivotal role played by the LBY in the assembly election victory and how it speaks to the BJP’s failure in reforming the welfare bureaucracy even in states with “double engine sarkar”.
Considering that “minimum government and maximum governance” was one of the cornerstones of the campaign that propelled the BJP to power in 2014, going for re-election a second time without anything substantive to show in the area of administrative reforms counts as a big step down.
Subhasish Ray is Professor and Associate Dean at the Jindal School of Government & Public Policy, O.P. Jindal Global University, Haryana; and an editor for the Journal of Genocide Research. He tweets @subhasish_ray75. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)