Key Points
The common messaging was that these income transfer schemes were meant to empower women socially and economically and provide them with a safety net..
. Ahead of the transfer of the first instalment, Chouhan told a gathering of women that the scheme was meant to change their lives as the amount would not just supplement their household income but also give them the liberty to spend it as they desired..
States have not carried out any pilots to study how beneficiaries use unconditional cash transfers but a small project by Self Employed Womens Association of India (SEWA) and Unicef in some very poor villages of Madhya Pradesh a decade ago sheds some light..
Former chief economic adviser in the finance ministry, Arvind Subramanian, making a case for universal basic income in the Economic Survey of 2016-17 argues for replacing some of the ongoing welfare schemes with a cash transfer scheme, rather than running them parallelly..
While Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh have launched income transfer schemes for women, it remains to be seen how long these schemes will be run..
