More women vote in India’s elections than men. Unsurprisingly therefore, over the past four years various state governments have started unconditional direct benefit transfers to their largest votebank – women. The Statesman says that this could be the beginning of something big, something profound:
“India may have stumbled into one of its most consequential social experiments without fully intending to: paying women simply for being the invisible engine of the household economy. What began as scattered state-level schemes of unconditional cash transfers has, in just a few years, grown into a nationwide phenomenon touching 118 million women. The sums are small, the politics loud, and the implications profound. For decades, unpaid domestic and care work has propped up India’s economic life without ever entering its accounting systems. Women spend hours each day cooking, cleaning, caregiving and managing crises ~ labour that sustains families, frees up men for paid work, and substitutes for public services that are missing or inadequate. Yet this work has been treated as natural, expected, and essentially valueless.
The quiet flow of 1,000 to 2,500 rupees a month into women’s bank accounts ~ for those who meet the basic eligibility filters ~ challenges that assumption in subtle but significant ways. The most striking lesson from the early evidence is not what these transfers do but what they don’t do. They do not deter women from seeking paid work, nor do they entrench domestic roles ~ fears often raised in feminist debates. Instead, they provide something Indian women have long been denied: predictable personal income and control over it. Whether spent on groceries, school fees, medicines or emergencies, the money represents agency. In many households, it reduces the friction of asking for cash. In others, it opens space for women to participate more strongly in decision-making.”
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