OVER the last few years, we have seen how the direct benefit transfer schemes targeted at women have become a central feature of the BJP’s electoral strategy across multiple states. Now, as we are moving towards Assembly elections in five states, it becomes extremely crucial that we revisit this tool that has been repeatedly and successfully deployed by BJP and its allies. We see a consistency in the design, timing and implementation of these schemes where expansive promises are announced in times of elections, and are followed by partial delivery, quiet retrenchment, bureaucratic exclusion, or outright abandonment. This gap between the promises and execution of these schemes is surely systematic, and it reveals the political economy logic that underpins these interventions.

In Bihar, the NDA government presented Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana as a flagship model, under which, by late 2025, official figures claimed disbursements exceeding Rs 15,600 crore to approximately 1.56 crore women. These transfers were concentrated in three major waves in the months preceding the November 2025 Assembly elections, in order to ensure maximum political visibility. The figure of Rs 10,000 per beneficiary was widely publicised, accompanied by claims that the scheme would enable women to establish viable livelihoods. However, the hollowness of this narrative gets exposed by the structure of the scheme itself. The initial Rs 10,000 was only supposed to be the first tranche. The much larger promised component, extending up to Rs 2 lakh for business plans, was made contingent on a six-month review process. There is little evidence that any significant number of beneficiaries ever accessed this second stage. For most women, the scheme amounted to a mere one-time transfer, not as the seed capital for sustainable employment as it was advertised.

This limited delivery was compounded by serious procedural and ethical concerns. Raising questions about the direct use of state funds to influence voters, a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Patna High Court highlighted that disbursements continued even after the Model Code of Conduct had come into force. Reports from multiple districts pointed to the emergence of an institutionalised system of “cut money”, where local intermediaries described as community mobilisers extracted amounts ranging from Rs 100 to Rs. 2,000 from each Rs 10,000 grant in return for “facilitation”. Political analysts widely acknowledged the scheme’s role in consolidating the NDA's victory.

The case of Madhya Pradesh is different from Bihar but it also shows an equally revealing picture. The Ladli Behna Yojana, which pays  Rs 1,250 per month to registered beneficiaries (raised to  Rs 1,500 in 2025), was among the promises that proved crucial for the BJP’s return to power in the state. However, after the completion of elections in 2023, despite the growing demand new registrations remained frozen, effectively placing this scheme in an administrative cold storage. During subsequent campaigns, promises were made to raise the monthly amount to Rs 3,000. However, only a marginal increase of Rs 250 materialised in reality. Backtracking of promises is compounded by constant payment delays, which bring additional financial stress to a significant chunk of vulnerable women who budget around this income. Also, it excludes unmarried women below 21 or above 60 years of age and families who cross specified income thresholds, creating bureaucratic categories of the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. 

The trajectory of Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana in Maharashtra was not too different. It was launched in July 2024 at Rs 1,500 per month and rolled out just months before the state elections. During the campaign, leaders of the ruling Mahayuti alliance made numerous promises to raise the amount to Rs 2,100 after their victory. But, once the elections got over, the 2025 Budget made no provision for this increase. Senior ministers then even denied that any such commitment had been made. They simply attributed the earlier statements to campaign “overpromising”. We also saw how the implementation itself became a source of exclusion. The government mandated e-KYC completion ahead of local body polls, which triggered widespread technical failures including, but not limited to OTP delays, server crashes and connectivity problems that threatened to disqualify nearly one crore women who were unable to complete the process in time. The episode served as an evidence of the gulf between claims of seamless digital governance and the lived reality of beneficiaries navigating fragile infrastructure.

Haryana’s Lado Lakshmi Yojana represents perhaps the clearest case of how a universal promise is transformed into a narrowly targeted, fiscally convenient programme. The BJP’s 2024 Haryana Sankalp Patra pledged Rs 2,100 per month to all women. But, the official notification of the scheme in September 2025 showed a tonne of restrictive eligibility criteria. Eligibility for the scheme required a family income capped at Rs 1 lakh per annum. This is a threshold so low that large sections of vulnerable households were automatically excluded. Applicants were also required to prove 15 years of continuous residency in the state, further disenfranchising migrants and a significant number of married women. Any family that receives another social security pension, or if any of its members is employed in government in any capacity, or any household paying income tax, was rendered ineligible for the scheme. The government itself projected that only 20-25 lakh women might qualify from a potential pool of around 80 lakh. However, the reality turned out even worse when the initial data revealed that merely 5.22 lakh women received the first payment, a coverage of less than 6 per cent of the promised electorate. This makes this scheme a rhetorical artefact whose substantive reach has been engineered downwards through bureaucratic design.

In Delhi, the Mahila Samriddhi Yojana was the most highlighted election promise of the BJP during the 2025 Assembly elections. The scheme made loud noises during its announcement, when it pledged Rs 2,500 per month to the women of the capital, but till date it remains a promise without substance. On March 8, 2025, the BJP government formally approved the scheme and opened registrations with pomp and show, again to disappoint the citizenry. Nothing followed the announcement, neither any budgetary allocation, nor any release of funds. This scheme, like some of its sisters in other states, exists only in cabinet resolutions and press statements.

Uttarakhand yet again illustrated another variation of the same pattern. The state government announced its intention to introduce a women and youth DBT scheme “modelled on Bihar”. Months later, it too survives solely as a headline, awaiting budgetary approval, without guidelines or a fixed date.

At the level of the Union government, the approach looks more ideologically consistent. There has been a steadfast refusal to introduce any universal monthly cash transfer for women. Instead, the emphasis has been on collateral-free loans under PM Mudra and targeted support for self-help groups through the National Rural Livelihood Mission. 

The common foundation of the above-mentioned is formed by the structural constraint of finance capital and neoliberal fiscal discipline. State governments which are burdened by debt and bound by deficit targets, have to calibrate welfare spending to avoid disturbing accumulation priorities. Here, welfare assistance to poor women is tolerated only to the extent where it does not threaten creditor interests. These schemes not only function as fiscal pressure valves to release the pressure but these also represent a contemporary reinvention of patronage. By branding beneficiaries as “Behna” or “Ladli”, in highly choreographed transfer ceremonies, where leaders symbolically release funds, the state attempts to adopt a familial idiom by staging a relationship of personal benevolence. This spectacle aims to obscure the impersonal character of social rights and recast citizens as recipients of gifts. The result is depoliticisation of women as they are encouraged to see themselves as supplicants rather than rights-bearing members of a democratic polity.

Pushing women into petty vending or home-based work without access to productive assets, collective organisation or secure markets only expands the reserve army of labour. These measures merely provide a subsistence floor that subsidises low-wage capitalism while disciplining the wider working class. Loans entangle sections of the petty bourgeoisie in the financial system, while meagre state-level transfers manage discontent among poorer strata.

The timing of launches and mass disbursements, most conspicuously in Bihar and Maharashtra, are evidence of the primary intent being electoral benefits to the ruling party. The incumbent BJP governments make use of the state resources as an overwhelming advantage that the opposition lacks, eroding the principle of fair electoral competition. Meanwhile, the fiscal capacity of the Centre is preserved for infrastructure benefiting big capital and regressive corporate tax concessions, while the costs of social pacification are devolved to already strained state budgets.

Conspicuously absent from all these schemes is any commitment to transferring productive assets. Land, cooperative dairies, tool banks, or collectively owned processing units could form the basis of genuine empowerment. Their exclusion reveals the intent behind individualised cash transfers which is to stimulate atomised consumption and cultivate dependence on a patron. The leaders position themselves as direct patrons, to weaken people’s faith in public institutions and to sideline the rights-based welfare systems. Welfare becomes contingent on personality rather than something embedded in citizenship. This theatricality of delivery further corrodes institutional trust, and it is safe to say that this erosion of institutional mediation is a defining feature of contemporary authoritarian tendencies.

What the BJP and its allies present as a new era of women-centric governance is nothing but an amalgamation of inflated promises, truncated delivery and calculated retreat. This contradiction between the BJP’s rhetoric and reality is the operational core of a strategy where welfare is merely an electoral instrument and women’s poverty is a resource to be managed.