Even as State after State is splurging on cash transfers for women, the most vulnerable among them, pregnant women, continue to be deprived of their legal right to maternity benefits. Worse, whatever little used to be paid to them seems to be shrinking. The main responsibility for this lies with the central government.
Under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013, all pregnant women (except those already covered in the formal sector) are entitled to maternity benefits of ₹6,000 a child. At today’s prices, this would mean ₹12,000 at the very least. Even that, of course, is a pittance. Still, affirming the principle of universal maternity entitlements was a groundbreaking feature of the NFSA. Even in relatively well-off households, pregnant women are often deprived of nutritious food, health care or rest time. Maternity benefits can help them to look after themselves and the newborn child.
Meagre as they are, maternity benefits under the NFSA are yet to be delivered. The central government is making a pretence of doing so under the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY). The PMMVY’s benefits, however, are restricted to one child a family, recently extended to a second child if it is a girl. This restriction is a blatant violation of the Act. Further, the benefits have been arbitrarily reduced to ₹5,000 for the first child.
Scant information
Even these restricted and reduced benefits are being denied to large numbers of entitled women. This failure is well hidden, because the Ministry of Women and Child Development discloses very little information on the PMMVY. The Ministry seems unaware of Section 4 of the Right to Information (RTI) Act, which calls for pro-active disclosure of basic information. Even the simplest of the PMMVY’s statistics are not in the public domain.
The Ministry, however, did respond to our RTI queries, on the PMMVY. Based on this information, we have estimated the PMMVY’s effective coverage, defined as the proportion of pregnant women who receive at least one instalment of PMMVY benefits. This is a broad definition: the first instalment is just ₹3,000, and strict conditionalities apply to the second instalment (front-loaded for second-child girls). The estimates are sobering: effective coverage peaked at an unimpressive 36% in 2019-20 and declined sharply after that, except for a partial revival in 2022-23. In 2023-24, effective coverage crashed to just 9% (see graph).
This crash is also visible in the Budget’s figures. Central government spending on the PMMVY was at an all-time low of ₹870 crore in 2023-24 — barely one third of the corresponding figure five years earlier, that too in money terms. To cover 90% of all births at just ₹6,000 a birth, the PMMVY would require a total budget of at least ₹12,000 crore.
The official line
We discussed these figures with the officials concerned in the Department of Women and Child Development, at the central and State levels. They did not deny that the PMMVY had come to a virtual standstill in 2023-24. They blamed this on major changes in software and implementation processes that were introduced in late 2023. Further scrutiny of the data suggests that the main problem was not a reduction in applications, but a reduced disbursement rate. According to one official, there were software problems “every day”.
The problem, however, did not begin in 2023-24. The PMMVY, launched in 2017, has been plagued with complications all along. More than a few of them are related to Aadhaar-based payments and digital tyranny. There have been numerous reports that have drawn attention to these complications and their exclusionary effects. Instead of responding to these ground reports, however, the central government created more complications in 2023-24, with disastrous consequences for Indian women. For the government, of course, the reduction in PMMVY expenditure is a good deal. Could this be one reason why the tendency to create hurdles is so resilient?
The examples of Tamil Nadu and Odisha
Meanwhile, States such as Tamil Nadu and Odisha have shown the possibility of designing simple and effective maternity-benefit schemes, from 1987 and 2009 onwards, respectively. The monetary support offered by them is more substantial than under the PMMVY — ₹10,000 a child in Odisha and ₹18,000 a child in Tamil Nadu. In Odisha, the amount was doubled ahead of the 2024 general election. In Tamil Nadu, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) promised to increase it to ₹24,000 in its 2021 election manifesto, and the party appears to be waiting for the next election to implement this promise. The PMMVY benefits, for their part, have never been raised, despite being lower than NFSA norms in the first place.
Not only are the amounts higher in Odisha and Tamil Nadu, but their implementation is also much better. Figures reported in Odisha’s Economic Survey suggest that maternity benefits covered about 64% of all births there in 2021-22 (the latest year for which data are available). In Tamil Nadu, coverage was 84% in 2023-24, when the all-India coverage under the PMMVY was below 10%. The contrast could hardly be sharper.
In the formal sector, Indian women enjoy a full 26 weeks of paid maternity leave (based on a 2017 amendment of the Maternity Benefits Act 1961), compared with a World Health Organization norm of 14 weeks. In the unorganised sector, they get a flat ₹5,000 if they are lucky enough to survive all the hoops they have to jump through for PMMVY benefits. These double standards are mind-boggling.
The time has come to admit that the PMMVY is a flop show. The central government seems to be more concerned with saving money than with helping pregnant women. As a result, it has ruined a programme that could have proved very useful and popular. It also stands in flagrant violation of the NFSA. The entire programme needs to be revamped in line with the letter and spirit of the Act. The benefits should also be raised and indexed to the price level. The entire society stands to gain from better public support for pregnant women.
Jean Drèze is Visiting Professor at the Department of Economics, Ranchi University. Reetika Khera is Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi
Published – February 27, 2025 12:16 am IST