The She Factor

 WHEN WOMEN NARRATED stories of domestic abuse, Sweety Kumari, a 24-year-old commerce graduate, who trained them in Madhubani paintings, made a resolve— to start Sankalp Creations, a company turning the traditional art form of Bihar’s Mithila region into a means of livelihood for them. She was clue­less that she had figured in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Mann ki Baat till an official in the textiles ministry sent her a clip of the episode. “I don’t watch television. I didn’t know anything,” says Kumari, who is planning to apply for a loan to expand her business.

“All these success stories teach us that our traditions hold in­numerable sources of income. If our resolve is strong, success cannot elude us,” Modi had said in his monthly radio programme on September 28, two days after he launched a scheme transferring ₹10,000 into the bank accounts of 75 lakh women in Bihar as seed money to promote women’s self-employment. Dedicating a sig­nificant part of his speech to the empowerment of women, he said his government’s Jan Dhan scheme had made it possible to send the money directly to them because of the 30 crore bank accounts opened by women under it. He went on to describe himself and the chief minister, Nitish Kumar, as two brothers of Bihar’s women working together for their “prosperity and dignity”. Both Modi and Nitish have basked in the support they have secured among women voters. Modi’s appeal among women voters began with Gujarat, which recorded a nearly 70 per cent turnout of women voters in 2012, and Nitish’s women-oriented policies and schemes became a game-changer in the way women voted in Bihar.

While there is no specific data for women voters in 1952, when the first Assembly election was held in the state, in 1967 just around 40 per cent women came out to vote, against 61 per cent of men. By 1989, the voting percentage of women was 50, still much below that of men at nearly 70 per cent. It was in 2010, six decades after universal adult franchise was established in the country for women, that the dominance of men in voter turnout came to an end in Bihar. That year saw 54.49 per cent women turn out to vote as against 51 per cent men. This, despite women’s literacy rate in the state, as per Census 2011, pegged at a dismal 51.5 per cent, the lowest in the coun­try which recorded an average female literacy rate of 64.63 per cent.

In 2005, the year the gender gap in voting had narrowed, Janata Dal (United), or JD(U), leader Nitish Kumar, after replacing Rash­triya Janata Dal’s (RJD) Rabri Devi, the state’s only woman chief minister, granted 50 per cent reservation to women in Panchayati Raj institutions. The following year he extended the policy to ur­ban local bodies. Nitish also launched the Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojana, a scheme that offered school­girls money to buy bicycles.

SINCE 2010, BIHAR’S women have outmatched men at the hus­tings in terms of voter turnout. During his second term as chief minister, Nitish’s government gave 35 per cent reservation to women in police. He promised to implement prohibition ahead of the 2015 elections, in which 60 per cent of women voted as against 53.32 per cent of men. He launched a scheme to provide funds to adolescent girls for sanitary nap­kins and improved the law and order situa­tion, all as part of moves to stem the school dropout rate. Nitish won over a vote bank that blurred caste lines, a factor that makes a big difference in Bihar.

The amplified participation of women, constituting 48 per cent of the state’s voters, has been factored into the calculations of the ruling Nitish Kumar-led National Democrat­ic Alliance (NDA) as well as the Opposition while drafting their poll strategies. It is simple arithmetic, one that negates caste divides. As Assembly elections neared in the state, the focus turned to women, with political parties competing to reach out to them, each side promising to empower them. The Opposi­tion Mahagathbandhan of RJD, Congress and the Left has promised a monthly assistance of  ₹2,500 to women from financially vulner­able backgrounds under a Mai Bahin Samman Yojana, if it comes to power. Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj Party pledged to secure 40 of the 243 Bihar Assembly seats for women.

The transfer of ₹10,000 has stirred the political pot ahead of the elections in Bihar. Under the Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana, women residents of Bihar, one from a household, aged 18 to 60, are eligible to apply for it if they are outside the income tax bracket and a member of a self-help group (SHG), a women’s collective which got a push with a World Bank-supported project called JEEViKa. After the initial grant, the women are eligible for an additional support of ₹2 lakh later, depending on the success of their business. “We have promised ₹30,000 a year to women. If the government wanted to make women self-reliant, why did they not start the scheme of giving ₹10,000 seed money earlier, and not just close to elections?” asks RJD MP Misha Bharti.

As of now, the beneficiaries of the scheme, which has instilled new hope in them, are making plans for their enterprises. Devki, whose story of using a solar pump for irrigation at Muzaffarpur’s Ratanpura village was lauded in Modi’s Mann ki Baat in August, is waiting to use the ₹10,000 to lay another 300 feet of pipeline. When Devki, now a member of an SHG, first asked her husband to invest in a solar pump, he had refused. He agreed later, spend­ing ₹2 lakh. As the farmers benefitted with their land getting irrigated with the solar pump, Devki started earning around ₹400-600 a day. Premlata Devi, 34, from Begusarai, is hoping to start a manihari business, selling goods like clothes, bangles and sindoor, with the ₹10,000 she has received in her account. Devi, who has studied till Class 6, hopes it will help her and her hus­band, a carpenter, make ends meet and take care of their four daughters. Her eldest daughter received money to buy a bicycle from the Nitish government. Mina Devi, 60, who is illiterate, also hopes to start a similar business in Nawada. Sunita Devi, 40, who sells biscuits and chocolates on a thela (cart) in Patna, used the grant to expand her business. For these women, the Modi-Nitish combine are benefactors. “The prime minister and chief minister have together helped us,” they say.

“The women voters are a vocal and sensitive group whom Nitish Kumar has reached out to, cutting across caste lines, through various schemes. There are now around 10 lakh SHGs in the state. The prime minister and chief minister together have earned the goodwill of the women voters,” says Bharatiya Janata Par­ty (BJP) leader Devesh Kumar. He cites the Lokniti-CSDS poll analysis which found NDA owed its narrow victory in 2020 to young women voters, with 40 per cent women and 33 per cent men voting for it in the 18-29 age group.

Congress has claimed 23 lakh women voters have been excluded from Bihar’s final electoral rolls, published by the Elec­tion Commission of India (EC) on Septem­ber 30, from 60 Assembly constituencies where there were close contests in 2020. Devesh Kumar dismisses the charge, saying, “Where has this 23 lakh figure come from? And what about their family members? Has anyone else made such an allegation? If the court is satisfied with the deletions, who is Congress to question them? It is just trying to cast aspersions on a constitutional body.”

Political parties have indulged in fierce competitive outreach to women in states like Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Delhi where elections have been held over the past two years, with schemes under which women beneficiaries receive anywhere between ₹1,000 and ₹2,500 a month. In Odisha, women voters had been a strong vote bank for former chief minister and Biju Janata Dal (BJD) leader Naveen Patnaik, with his government’s Mission Shakti empowering SHGs. After BJP came to power last year, Modi launched the Subhadra scheme, providing ₹10,000 in annual assistance to women aged 21 to 60, with an annual income of ₹2.5 lakh or less. The Congress government in Karnataka rolled out the Gruha Lakshmi scheme, providing ₹2,000 every month to women heading a below poverty line (BPL) family, a pre-poll promise. In West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress government launched the Lakshmi Bhandar scheme in 2021, providing financial assistance of ₹1,000 to eligible women in the age group of 25-60. For Scheduled Tribe (ST) and Scheduled Caste (SC) women, the amount was scaled up to ₹1,200. In Tamil Nadu, MK Stalin’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government has launched the Kalaingar Magalir Urimai Thittam, granting ₹1,000 every month to women over 21 with annual family income not exceeding ₹2.5 lakh. In March 2023, as Madhya Pradesh headed for Assembly elections later in the year, then Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who had come to be called ‘Mamaji’ after he launched a series of schemes for girls in 2007, initiated the Ladli Behna Yojana, providing ₹1,000 monthly to women aged 23-60 with an annual income of less than ₹2.5 lakh. Closer to elections, the amount was raised to ₹1,250 and the minimum age for eligi­bility lowered to 21. To counter this, Congress pledged an assis­tance of ₹1,500 a month to women under a Nari Samman Nidhi, after which Chouhan raised the quantum under the Ladli Behna Scheme to ₹3,000, seen as one of the factors responsible for BJP returning to power in the state.

For the Opposition, these remained promises while parties in power rolled out the schemes months before elections, as in Ma­harashtra and Jharkhand. In Delhi, where the scheme was to be implemented after polls, Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) failed to cash in on his promise of ₹2,100 a month to Delhi’s women.

“Nitish Kumar has had a good hold over women voters after prohibition and schemes for cycles and sanitary napkins. A Kurmi himself, which is just 2.8 per cent of the state’s population, he has created his own vote bank by consolidating the women and Ex­tremely Backward Class (EBC), and done it quite successfully,” says DM Diwakar, professor of economics and director, Development Research Institute, Madhubani.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, when the number of new women voters enrolled exceeded that of new male voters by 15 per cent, the turnout of women voters across the country lagged behind men by just 0.02 per cent. In 2019, the percentage of women coming out to vote surpassed that of men by 0.16 percentage points. The statistics, the change in the pattern of women’s voting, and their rising aspira­tions have spurred political parties to focus on a constituency that makes up nearly 50 per cent of the population.