Illustration by Matt Haney, GPJ
BENGALURU, INDIA — Sumathi Muniswamy, 52, hasn’t missed a single election since she got her voter’s card when she was 18.
“That is the only way I can make my voice heard,” she says.
But the May 2023 elections for the Karnataka state assembly featured a new kind of campaign promise. The Congress Party promised women in the state that if it came to power, they’d receive 2,000 Indian rupees (about US$23) every month, transferred to their bank accounts.
It’s become increasingly common across the country for politicians to promise citizens, particularly women who don’t have much money, cash in exchange for votes. Since 2020, in 14 out of 28 Indian states, political party manifestos have promised unconditional cash transfers to women, and star campaigners now promise between 1,000 and 3,000 rupees (US$12 and US$35) per month per family, depending on the state. In some jurisdictions, parties promise cash to farmers and elderly people as well.
In 2022, the Congress Party promised cash transfers to women in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, which it went on to win. A year before that, Trinamool Congress Party made similar promises in the eastern state of West Bengal. During the February elections to Delhi’s assembly, Bharatiya Janata Party, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party, promised to transfer 2,500 rupees (about US$29) to every woman’s bank account. The incumbent Aam Aadmi Party had promised 2,100 rupees (about US$25). The BJP won.
Some call the cash transfers bribes. But, in a country where half the population can’t afford a healthy diet and more than 80% of young Indians are unemployed, others call them transformational.
Unfair or welfare?
To receive money from the Congress Party in Karnataka, women had to prove that they were state residents and that their annual family income was below 120,000 rupees (about US$1,400).
Muniswamy qualified — and the cash would add handsomely to the 8,000 rupees (about US$93) she earns every month by cleaning homes. She wasn’t alone. Within three months after the elections, by August 2023, 13.3 million women had enrolled to receive the stipend.
It was an easy process. India’s universal biometric system, called Aadhaar, contains digital identities for almost 1.4 billion Indians — roughly the entire country — and bank accounts and mobile phone numbers are connected to the database. Muniswamy says Congress Party workers came to her neighborhood, got all the paperwork in order and ensured that more than 200 eligible women in her neighborhood were enrolled.
According to Axis Bank research, these programs have collectively reached around 134 million women — a fifth of India’s adult female population.
As of November 2024, political parties had spent the equivalent of 0.6% of India’s GDP on these cash-transfer programs. For context, the Indian government spent 1.9% of its GDP on health care in the 2023-24 year.
“Unconditional cash transfers signal a huge shift in the ‘welfare politics’ of the country,” says K.K. Kailash, a professor of political science at the University of Hyderabad.
For decades after independence from colonial rule, the Indian state fashioned itself as the sole provider of basic benefits. In those years, Muniswamy says, one house she worked in waited seven years for a telephone line. The government was the country’s only provider of such services back then. The government was also supposed to provide free education, she says.
Instead, families had to pay bribes to send their kids to government school.
Back then, campaigning politicians only promised better services or infrastructure upgrades — smooth roads, 24-hour electricity, better schools. Caste leaders promised their respective caste groups quotas in government jobs or higher education.
But those promises were easy to break.
“If we thought they didn’t keep their promises,” says Sheela Srinivasan, an autorickshaw driver in Bengaluru, “we had to wait five years to vote them out.”
Things shifted around 1991, says economist Ritu Dewan, president of the 64th Conference of Indian Society of Labour Economics. Private industries began to compete in various sectors for the first time since India’s independence in 1947.
And rather than fix systemic issues to provide better government services, Dewan says, politicians have opted to just pay cash.
‘We don’t owe them anything’
Srinivasan says she’d prefer it if the government ensured that her 8-year-old daughter could go to school, rather than giving out cash.
“What is the point of getting 2,000 rupees a month when a good school’s fee is around 80,000 rupees per year?” she asks.
Srinivasan lives in south Bengaluru’s Koramangala area, a relatively expensive neighborhood. She works 10 hours a day and her husband holds a full-time job as a janitor at a software company, but she sometimes takes loans out to pay her daughter’s school fees. She’ll take the 2,000 rupees, she says, but had hoped to get more from the government.
The cash programs, though, have become one of the most reliable ways to get anything from leaders. Tara Krishnaswamy, a Bengaluru-based political consultant who focuses on these programs, says they’re more successful than other government initiatives.
Since parties promise basic income before elections, the onus is on party workers, rather than the clunky government bureaucracy, to enrol the beneficiaries. This increases accountability, Krishnaswamy says, adding that 85% to 95% of the beneficiaries get the promised money. In past programs, she says, only 60% to 70% of people would get any given benefit, even years later, because implementation was left to the administrative machinery.
The elimination of middlemen due to digitalization has also made it easier for politicians to claim credit, especially because their parties transfer the money directly, via Aadhaar.
Politicians use language that makes these benefits seem like a favor to the population, Kailash says. “Many voters think of these as gifts given out of the kindness of a politician’s heart and not as their right to social protections.”
Srinivasan is one of them. She says politicians don’t owe citizens money, so if they’re offering cash, it must be out of kindness.
“However,” she says, “we don’t owe them anything. We will vote for people who work for us — not who give us money.”
