Mehmoona Subhan Shaikh, 60, is unlettered but her neighbours in the Bharat Nagar slum in Bandra East credit her with possessing deep knowledge of local politics.
Fondly referred to as moti khala or big aunty, Shaikh has lived in this slum colony on the edge of the Bandra-Kurla Complex office district since the late 1980s, and according to her neighbours, has accurately predicted the results of previous elections.
Shaikh believes the Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojna, scheme launched by the Mahayuti government in Maharashtra on the eve of assembly polls, has the potential to be a gamechanger for the ruling coalition.
Under this direct cash transfer scheme, women in Maharashtra between the ages of 21 and 65 years, with an annual family income of up to Rs 2.5 lakh, have been receiving Rs 1,500 per month in their bank accounts since July.
“So far I have received Rs 7,500 under the scheme, a further Rs 802 has been credited into my account as the first instalment for the three free LPG cylinders annually available under the scheme,” Shaikh said. Having undergone a heart surgery a few years ago, she is using this money to pay for medicines, most of which, she says, are not available for free in civic and state run hospitals.
Khurshida Shabbir, 52, who was among the women gathered at Mahmoona Shaikh’s 10 foot-by-15 foot tenement, is also a beneficiary of the scheme. However, she was sceptical about whether the scheme would continue after the elections.
This concern has been articulated so frequently that Chief Minister Eknath Shinde has had to counter it. In fact, the ruling alliance has been claiming, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi did in a campaign speech in Dhule district on Friday, that the Opposition would stop the Ladki Bahin Yojna if it came to power.
In a rally in Kolhapur on Sunday, BJP MP Dhananjay Mahadik threatened to act against beneficiaries of the scheme who were seen attending Opposition rallies. He urged his supporters to take photos of such women and note down their names. “I will take care of the rest,” he said. The Election Commission has sent Mahadik a notice and sought an explanation.
As Maharashtra heads to a tumultuous election, the Bharatiya Janata Party and its partners in the state – the Eknath Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar group of the Nationalist Congress Party – are hoping that the Ladki Bahin scheme will do for them what the Ladli Bahen programme did for the Shivraj Singh Chauhan government in Madhya Pradesh: help it retain power.
The Maharashtra scheme has a budgetary allocation of Rs 46,000 crore this year. It also has a publicity budget of nearly Rs 200 crore, which has clearly been effective.
According to a MIT-SOG and Lokniti-CSDS survey conducted in Maharashtra in October, eight in 10 voters were aware of the Ladki Bahin scheme. Seven in 10 had benefited from it directly.
Maharashtra’s Women and Child Development Minister Aditi Tatkare has said that the scheme has 2.34 crore beneficiaries. As per the latest electoral rolls, the state has 4.6 crore women voters.
What impact the cash transfer scheme will have on voting behaviour, though, is still unclear. At the Shri Pimpleshwar Wadi chawl in Bandra West, domestic worker Ankita Shinde, 27, rattled off a list of grocery items and vegetables that have become more expensive over the last few months.
“Of course I am happy to be receiving money under the scheme, but it feels like they give with one hand and take away with the other,” Shinde said. “A pouch of cooking oil that only some time back cost Rs 100 now costs Rs 140.”
Shinde works in several households every day. Her husband Amit is a driver. With Rs 8,000 to be paid in rent for their slum room, electricity and water bills, groceries, vegetables and medical bills of their parents, their combined income is stretched thin.
Shinde’s lament found echo among a group of women waiting in the scorching heat to hear opposition leaders of the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi alliance speak at a rally in Mumbai early November in Mumbai.
“I refused to fill the form, so did several other women,” Meena Limbole replied in anger when asked if they were beneficiaries of the Ladki Bahin Yojna.
Limbole’s is one of the 600-odd families who were rendered homeless on June 6 when municipal officials demolished their homes in Jai Bhim Nagar slum near the upmarket Hiranandani complex in Powai in the north eastern part of the city. Limbole and others maintain that the demolitions were illegal.
“We have all been living on the pavement under tarpaulin sheets through these four months of monsoon, somehow finding ways to keep our kids and their school books dry,” said her neighbour, Parbatabai Rapanvad.
On October 5, following a petition in the High Court filed by Limbole and others, the police filed an FIR against some municipal officials and a company that is part of the Hiranandani real-estate group for carrying out the demolition. The group has resolved to vote for whichever party restores their housing rights.
At the joint rally, the Opposition alliance – the Congress, the Shiv Sena group headed by Uddhav Thackeray and the Nationalist Congress Party faction headed by Sharad Pawar – announced that they would institute their own cash transfer scheme for women if they are elected to power.
Rahul Gandhi spoke of a Mahalakshmi Yojna, that would pay women in Maharashtra Rs 3,000 per month. In addition, girls and women would be given free transportation in government buses.
The next day, newspapers carried front page advertisements announcing the ruling Mahayuti alliance’s intention to increase its monthly cash transfer under Ladki Bahin Yojna to Rs 2,100.
In Jalna, in the Marathwada region, the cash transfer scheme to women is one of the main talking points of the Mahayuti campaign. Jalna was the epicentre of the protests by the Maratha community for reservations in educational seats and government jobs and one of the four seats in Marathwada that the BJP lost in the Lok Sabha elections,
But Sarita Maroti Khandare, a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), was not impressed. She said such welfare schemes are a cynical electoral strategy. After all, existing welfare schemes such as the Sanjay Gandhi Niradhar Yojna, which gives up to Rs 900 per month to widows, divorced women, orphaned children and others, and the Shravan Bal Yojna, which gives Rs 600 per month to those above the age of 65, are not being executed properly, she said.
Meetings to clear applications have not been held since 2021, she claimed. “Hundreds of destitute women are waiting to avail of their rightful benefits,” Khandare said. “Meanwhile the Ladki Bahin Yojna applications were cleared almost overnight, potentially compromising on scrutiny of eligibility criteria.”
In Beed, another seat the BJP lost in the general election, trade union leader Baliram Bhumee said that the Hindutva party and its allies are on firmer ground this time around. Part of the reason for this, he said, is because the Ladki Bahin scheme is popular among the women farm labourers he works with.
However, Bhumee, the state secretary of the All India Agricultural Workers Union, noted that this trend of competitive welfarism among political parties has meant that they do not get punished for failing to provide basic healthcare and education. Primary health centres are not adequately funded, while midday meal workers remain woefully underpaid, he said.
In addition to Maharashtra, six states have implemented cash transfer schemes for women that pay out amounts of between Rs 1,000 and Rs 2,000. These states – Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand and Delhi – are ruled by a variety of political parties.
Like the trade unionist Bhumee, economist Yamini Aaiyar also notes that competitive welfarism is silent on core public services such as health, education, nutrition, relying instead on very specific cash and kind transfers delivered via direct benefit transfer mechanisms.
Though schemes like Ladki Bahin are here to stay, she writes, a public debate is needed on the nature and the form of this competitive form of welfarism.
