Launched in September 2023, the scheme provides women heads of families Rs 1,000 a month in “recognition of the triple burden of women who invest unquantified time and effort in unpaid care work and in productive economic work”. Initially covering 1.13 crore women, the scheme has now been expanded to 1.3 crore beneficiaries – nearly one in four people in the state.
The latest transfer – of Rs 3,000 covering the months of February, March and April, and an additional Rs 2,000 as a “special summer package” – comes ahead of the implementation of the Model Code of Conduct for the elections.
While this move by Chief Minister Stalin is being seen as his major outreach to women on the eve of elections, the Opposition parties have attacked him for resorting to it over fear of losing the polls.
The scale and timing of Stalin’s announcement reflected a pattern seen in recent state Assembly elections. From Karnataka in 2023 to Bihar last year, women voters and direct transfer schemes for them seem to have become mainstays of political strategy cutting across party lines for winning elections.
Here is a look at these schemes in various states, their impact on elections, and subsequent implementation.
Karnataka, HP
At the core of the then Opposition Congress’s campaign in the 2023 Karnataka Assembly elections were five guarantees, including the Gruha Lakshmi Scheme promising Rs 2,000 per month to each woman head of a family.
That year, the Congress won 135 seats in the 224-member House, ousting the BJP from power. The Congress’s victory was fuelled by its performance in seats where women voters turned out in greater numbers than men – in 52 such seats, the Congress led with wins in 28, followed by the then incumbent BJP at 18 and the Janata Dal (Secular) at 5.
Though the implementation of the Gruha Lakshmi Scheme was delayed, it was rolled out three months after the elections with much fanfare. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Deputy CM D K Shivakumar, party national president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi were all present at a rally in Mysuru from where the scheme was launched.
At the time of its launch, 1.15 crore women had enrolled in the programme with the government allocating Rs 17,500 crore in 2023-24. Though the Congress had initially announced that all women heads of a family would benefit from the scheme, it changed the norms to help only such women whose husbands do not pay income tax.
In 2022, in the Himachal Pradesh elections, the then Opposition Congress had emerged victorious after promising a Rs 1,500 monthly allowance for women aged 18 to 60. However, the programme ran into financial troubles and was only implemented in 2024 with a budgetary outlay of Rs 800 crore to benefit 5 lakh women.
Madhya Pradesh
The BJP made a splash in March 2023, ahead of the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections, with its Ladli Behna scheme to provide a monthly stipend of Rs 1,000 to women aged 21 to 60 from low-income families. With an eye on at least 18 seats where women voters outnumbered men, months before the elections, the grant was raised to Rs 1,250, with a promise to gradually raise it to Rs 3,000.
Initially, there were reservations within a section of the BJP over the scheme, with its leadership struggling to defend it given Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s routine attacks against Opposition parties over ‘revdi culture’.
But with voter turnout, including for women, reaching record highs, and women voting at a greater rate than men in 34 seats, the BJP won the election in a landslide with 166 seats in the 230-member Assembly. The Congress fell to 66 seats despite making a similar promise to grant women Rs 1,500 per month under its Nari Samman Yojana.
In its first Budget after the election, the BJP government allocated Rs 18,984 crore to the Ladli Behna scheme, a substantial jump from Rs 8,000 crore earmarked for the scheme in 2023. The scheme now has 1.26 crore beneficiaries.
In Chhattisgarh, which held Assembly polls along with Madhya Pradesh, after the BJP promised married women Rs 12,000 per year, the Congress went a step further and promised Rs 15,000 a year to all women aged 18 and older. However, it wasn’t enough to buck anti-incumbency with the BJP sweeping the Congress out of power.
Odisha, Andhra Pradesh
In Odisha, which held its Assembly polls simultaneously with the Lok Sabha elections in 2024, the Biju Janata Dal (BJD)’s nearly 25 years in power had been underpinned by its strong support among women, particularly the 70 lakh members of the state’s 6 lakh women self-help groups. But with the BJP looking to break into this vote bank, ahead of the elections, it promised the flagship Subhadra scheme to grant women aged 21 to 60 Rs 50,000 over five years.
The scheme appeared to have given the BJP a leg up, with the party winning 78 of the state’s 147 Assembly seats and 20 of its 21 Lok Sabha seats. At the time, BJP leaders said the scheme’s successful rollout would help the party “create its own support base among women”.
In September 2024, an altered version of the scheme was rolled out. Eligible women would receive Rs 10,000 annually in two instalments of Rs 5,000 each, coming up to a total budgetary outlay of Rs 55,825 crore. The government set a target to cover 1 crore women, with an initial outlay of Rs 10,000 crore.
In Andhra Pradesh, which also held simultaneous Assembly and Lok Sabha polls, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) managed to dislodge the YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) after promising a series of freebies and welfare schemes, including monthly assistance of Rs 1,500 for women age 18 to 59. The TDP’s win came despite the fact that it was the YSRCP that had launched among the earliest such direct cash transfers for women in 2020.
Haryana
Before the BJP won a record third term in Haryana in 2024, it had promised to launch the Lado Lakshmi scheme to provide Rs 2,100 in monthly financial assistance to women aged 23 to 60 with annual family incomes under Rs 1.8 lakh. The Congress, too, had promised Rs 2,000 per month to women aged 18 to 60, but the party again failed to dislodge the BJP in the elections.
In September 2025, the first of the scheme’s four phases was formally launched by the BJP government in the state, covering 20 lakh women with a budgetary outlay of Rs 5,000 crore in 2025-26.
Maharashtra, Jharkhand
In Maharashtra, where the women’s turnout rose by almost 6 percentage points in the 2024 Assembly polls compared to 2019, the ruling Mahayuti won 235 of the state’s 288 seats on the back of its Ladki Bahin scheme to grant Rs 1,500 per month to women aged 18 to 65 from families with annual incomes under Rs 2.5 lakh.
With an estimated 2.5 crore women benefitting from the scheme, the BJP-led Mahayuti was able to corner women’s votes, particularly after it announced it would raise the monthly grant to Rs 2,100 ahead of the Assembly polls. The Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi had similarly promised women Rs 3,000 a month, but to no avail.
However, the scheme has since had teething problems given its estimated Rs 63,000 crore burden on the exchequer in a state already facing debts amounting to Rs 7 lakh crore in 2023-24, the year before the scheme was launched. But the Mahayuti has persisted, even promising to raise the grant to Rs 3,000 per month in the future.
In Jharkhand, too, the ruling Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM)’s Mukhyamantri Maiya Samman Yojana was launched in August 2024 ahead of the Assembly polls in a bid to overcome anti-incumbency. Under the scheme, all women aged 18 to 50 years would receive Rs 1,000 per month. After a comfortable win for the JMM-led INDIA bloc, the government promised to increase the monthly grant to women to Rs 2,500.
Here too, women were crucial to the election outcome. Women voters outnumbered men in 85% of the seats in the state. On 68 out of 81 seats, women’s turnout was higher than that of men. The women voting percentage jumped from 67% in 2019 to over 70% in 2024.
Bihar
CM Nitish Kumar, in his first Janata Dal (United) government over 20 years ago, had launched a transformative free bicycle scheme for school-going girls in 2006. The programme has been credited with not only raising girls’ enrolment rates but also cultivating a mass following among women for the JD(U).
Ahead of the 2025 Assembly polls, the Nitish-led NDA government launched the Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana, promising Rs 2.1 lakh in instalments to women entrepreneurs, with the first instalment of Rs 10,000 deposited in bank accounts of 1.56 crore women just ahead of polling.
The scheme’s popularity cemented Nitish’s supremacy in state politics. He secured a record 10th term as the CM as voter turnout hit new records, with women in particular outvoting men by 8.8 percentage points – the largest ever gap.
In February, the scheme’s second instalment was disbursed with the 2026-27 Budget increasing the allocation by Rs 7,608 crore to Rs 23,701 crore.
Delhi
In early 2025, the Delhi Assembly polls had also seen a game of one-upmanship over schemes targeting women voters. Each of the three major contenders — the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the BJP and the Congress — had promised monthly financial assistance to women. While the AAP promised Rs 2,100, the BJP and Congress each promised Rs 2,500. Women, particularly from poor households, had been a crucial vote bank for the incumbent AAP, but the BJP nevertheless managed to win the election, forming what is only its second government in Delhi.
As per a Lokniti-CSDS post-poll survey, though AAP retained its edge among women voters, it saw a decline in their support from the 2020 polls, from 60% to 49%, even as women’s turnout exceeded that of men for the first time in Delhi.
In March 2025, the BJP government approved the Mahila Samridhi Yojana, providing Rs 5,100 crore in its Budget for the first year of the scheme, which is now limited to one woman per household, aged 21 and 60 years, with an annual family income up to Rs 2.5 lakh.