BENGALURU—Saraswathi paid particular attention to the elections in his native Tamil Nadu last April. The COVID-19 pandemic had ravaged the 47-year-old’s finances, and the incumbent All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the opposing party Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam promised relief in the form of monthly cash transfers to women . Saraswathi, who like many Tamilians does not use a surname, had voted for the incumbent president in the last two elections. But this time, she said, it was time for a change.

“We suffered from the pandemic, and the previous government couldn’t do anything to help us,” she said, her face sunburned and spattered with age spots from decades of farm labor under the tropical skies of southern India. Saraswathi voted for the opposing party, and when the new government took power, she received around $50 in cash for women hit hard by the pandemic.

Women are the fastest growing political constituency in India. Sixty-seven percent of the country’s registered female voters, or 294 million individuals, cast their ballots in the 2019 national elections. While registered male voters still outnumber female voters, a greater proportion of women turned out to ballot boxes in the 2019 national elections. than men – the first time in India’s history that the gender gap in voting has reversed. Politicians across the country are taking notice. In recent years, political parties in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Goa have launched a host of new social programs aimed at empowering women and win their increasingly important votes.

BENGALURU—Saraswathi paid particular attention to the elections in his native Tamil Nadu last April. The COVID-19 pandemic had ravaged the 47-year-old’s finances, and the incumbent All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the opposing party Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam promised relief in the form of monthly cash transfers to women . Saraswathi, who like many Tamilians does not use a surname, had voted for the incumbent president in the last two elections. But this time, she said, it was time for a change.

“We suffered from the pandemic, and the previous government couldn’t do anything to help us,” she said, her face sunburned and spattered with age spots from decades of farm labor under the tropical skies of southern India. Saraswathi voted for the opposing party, and when the new government took power, she received around $50 in cash for women hit hard by the pandemic.

Women are the fastest growing political constituency in India. Sixty-seven percent of registered women voters nationwide, or up to 294 million people-voted in the 2019 national elections. While registered male voters still outnumber female voters, a higher proportion of women than men voted in the 2019 national elections – the first time in the history of the India that the gender gap in voting has reversed. Politicians across the country are taking notice. In recent years, political parties in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Goa have launched a host of new social programs aimed at empowering women and win their increasingly important votes.

In August 2021, the incumbent All India Trinamool Congress party government in West Bengal baffled the polls by winning a third term – a victory widely attributed to strong support among certain groups of women, including tribal, Muslim and low-income women, as well as women from India’s privileged castes. The leader of the party and chief minister of the state, Mamata Banerjee, had launched several programs targeting low-income women and girls. In elections in Assam last year, female voters played a similar central role in keeping the Bharatiya Janata Party in power, after the party introduced a series of direct transfer benefit programs for women last year. former.

“This idea that women as a constituency are different from men was noticed by many during the elections in Bihar [in 2005], when Nitish Kumar promised cycles for girls,” said Mukulika Banerjee, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics. Access to bicycles has been widely reported to have helped reduce the school dropout rate among girls, something Banerjee said Kumar “definitely rewarded” for. Women’s participation in elections in the state has risen from 42% in 2005 to almost 60% in 2020, according to data from the Election Commission of India. And Kumar, now Bihar’s chief minister, continues to tout social welfare programs for women as a key part of his party’s platform.

Campaigns on pre-election cash benefit programs have become so widespread that they have caught the attention of India’s judiciary. The Delhi High Court, the supreme court of the union territory of Delhi, is currently hearing a case against two parties – the Indian National Congress and the Telugu Desam party – for promising cash transfers ahead of the 2019 elections in the ‘Andhra Pradesh. At the end of 2021, the court issued an opinion to the electoral commission asking it to take stronger action against “corrupt electoral practices”, such as offering cash inducements.

But advocates of the programs say the incentives are just fixing long-standing inequities. “It’s not about gifts or benefits,” said Banerjee, the anthropologist. “Perhaps it has as much to do with the politics of recognition. It is about recognizing that women live with structural inequalities.

Whether for political purposes or not, putting money in the hands of women has real economic benefits. “Resources controlled by women unambiguously improve their bargaining power within the home,” said Karthik Muralidharan, professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego. In many parts of India, women are bound by patriarchal customs. Gudiya Devi, a newlywed from Bihar state, has no access to household finances, which are controlled by her husband and in-laws. “I have to depend on them for basic necessities,” Devi said.

Providing cash transfers to women has been shown to increase spending on things that benefit the whole family, such as food, education and health care. Saraswathi, who has benefited from several social welfare programs reserved for women, often hides the money she receives from the government from her husband. “Otherwise,” she said, “he would spend it all on booze.”

A more empowered female population has also been shown to benefit the economy as a whole. A policy experiment conducted by researchers at Yale University in rural Madhya Pradesh found that women whose wages are deposited directly into their own bank accounts are more likely to work outside the home. Female labor force participation in India has been declining since 2005 and has fallen further during the pandemic. Direct deposit programs that give women autonomy over their finances can help slow or reverse this trend.

Kamalam, a 41-year-old entrepreneur from Tamil Nadu, who also does not use a surname, was a homemaker until a decade ago when she started benefiting from various government programs including microloans, livelihoods, motherhood and now pandemic support programs. “I opened a bank account to save money for myself, but over time I ended up starting my own dairy farm,” she said. “Now even my husband helps me with the farm work.”

While it’s easy to dismiss the onslaught of women-only cash transfer programs as political convenience, the financial benefits for women and the economy are real.

Saraswathi’s old thatched-roof house, which she shared with her husband, has been replaced by a modest one-bedroom brick house, partly thanks to a loan from Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, a national housing program launched in 2015 to encourage affordable housing. To be eligible for benefits, low-income families must include a female member of the household as a co-applicant. Saraswathi’s role in securing these benefits gave her a level of control over household finances that she did not have before, including a say in what paint colors and tiles would be used for their new home.

But it remains to be seen how well cash transfer programs like these can achieve their purported goal of helping address entrenched gender inequalities. While Saraswathi’s name was required for her family to be eligible for housing benefits, ownership of their new home was not. The house, adorned with shiny tiles and colorful walls that Saraswathi herself chose, is in her husband’s name.