Human Development

Empowering daughters: How conditional cash transfers can shift cultural norms

  • Blog Post Date 18 December, 2024
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Christopher Cornwell

University of Georgia

cornwl@uga.edu

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Laura Zimmermann

University of Georgia

lvzimmer@uga.edu

During the last 30 years, Indian governments have implemented over 20 programmes that reward parents who have daughters and invest in them after birth. Yet, very little is known about these programmes’ effectiveness in reducing son preference and shifting cultural norms. Analysing the impact of a scheme with many typical design features, the article finds that such programmes are rightfully part of the policy toolkit and deserve more attention. 

Amartya Sen coined the term “missing women” in the early 1990s, indicating the severe sex-ratio imbalance between men and women in some countries, caused by son preference and patriarchal cultural norms (Sen 2010). The scale of the problem remains large, with over 1.6 million girls worldwide who are either not born or die prematurely after birth every year (Bongaarts and Guilmoto 2015).1 As is well known, sex ratios in the 0-6-year age group (child sex ratio) in many Indian states have been worsening despite large improvements in educational attainment and economic development. The maps in Figure 1 depict this trend, comparing child sex ratios from the 2001 and 2011 Censuses for each state. Reducing son preference therefore continues to be an urgent policy need. 

Figure 1. State map of ratio of 0-6-year old boys to girls, in 2001 and 2011 


One of the most popular policy tools for state governments and – at times – the national government has been conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes focusing on girls. As early as 1992, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu started providing financial incentives for having a daughter to enrolled families. Table 1 provides an overview of Indian girl child CCT programmes by start year, with their spatial coverage and scope. In addition to a payout for the birth of a girl, many of these schemes encourage continued investment in daughters through additional payouts for immunisations, educational attainment, and remaining unmarried until age 18. 

Table 1. Overview of girl child conditional cash transfer programmes

Girl CCT programme

Start Year

Spatial Coverage

Scope

Rajalakshmi

1992

Rajasthan

Birth

Girl Child Protection Scheme

1992

Tamil Nadu

Birth, education

Apni Beti Apna Dhan

1994

Haryana

Birth, education, marriage

Kunwarbainu Mameru Yojana

1995

Gujarat

Marriage

Girl Child Protection Scheme

1996

Andhra Pradesh

Birth, immunisation, education, marriage

Kanya Jagriti Jyoti Scheme

1996

Punjab

Birth

Balika Samriddhi Yojana

1997

National*

Birth, education, marriage

Devi Rupak

2002

Haryana

Birth

Balri Rakshak Yojana

2005

Punjab

Birth

Ladli Scheme

2005

Haryana

Birth, immunisation, education

Bhagyalakshmi

2006

Karnataka

Birth, immunisation, education, marriage

Mukhya Mantri Kanyadan Yojana

2006

Madhya Pradesh

Marriage

Ladli Lakshmi Yojana

2007

Madhya Pradesh

Birth, education, marriage

Indira Gandhi Balika Suraksha Yojana

2007

Himachal Pradesh

Birth

Dhanlakshmi Scheme

2008

National#

Birth, immunisation, education, marriage

Mukhya Mantri Kanya Vivah Yojana

2008

Bihar

Marriage

Mukhya Mantri Kanya Suraksha Yojana

2008

Bihar

Birth

Ladli

2008

Delhi

Birth, education

Majoni

2009

Assam

Birth

Beti Hai Anmol

2010

Himachal Pradesh

Birth, education, marriage

Mamta

2011

Goa

Birth, immunisation, education

* Continued in Gujarat; continued in Himachal Pradesh until 2010.

# Eleven blocks in seven states (Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha). 

How well these programmes work to reduce son preference and shift cultural norms is largely unknown. The limited empirical evidence we have documents adverse effects: for example, Haryana’s Devi Rupak programme, implemented in 2002, actually worsened the sex ratio at first birth by 1-2% (Anukriti 2018). 

A plausible explanation for these adverse effects is the strict eligibility requirement, typical of many early girl child CCTs: the programme required sterilisation and a maximum of two children (either one child or two girls) to remain eligible for future payouts. We study whether the design features more common among newer girl child programmes, which abolish the sterilisation and family size conditions, are more successful in achieving an improvement in the child sex ratio. 

The study

In a new paper (Biswas, Cornwell and Zimmermann, forthcoming), we study the Dhanlakshmi programme, which was introduced in 2008 as a pilot programme by the Ministry of Women and Child Development of the Government of India. It provided financial payouts for girls born on or after 19 November 2008 who reached critical milestones, including: birth; important immunisations in the first two years of life; each year of school enrolment and attendance; and remaining unmarried until age 18. While the monetary benefits were similar to earlier programmes like Devi Rupak, there were no eligibility restrictions other than living in an area where the programme was implemented. Crucially, there was no restriction on fertility or the number of girls within a household who could be enrolled in the scheme. While the programme stopped enrolling new beneficiaries in 2013, the financial commitments to enrolled households continue to be honoured. 

We focus on the impact of the Dhanlakshmi scheme in Punjab, where we compare outcomes for girls and their mothers in the ‘treated’ (subject to intervention) district of Fatehgarh Sahib with other Punjabi districts where the scheme did not exist, both before and after the scheme was introduced. Based on the 2001 Census, Fatehgarh Sahib had the worst child sex ratio in all of India, with 766 girls per 1,000 boys. Within the district, the block of Sirhind, which had a child sex ratio of 749, was chosen as a ‘treatment’ area for the programme. 

The financial incentives were meaningful in this context: The first milestone, registering the birth of the girl, was associated with a Rs. 5,000 payout, roughly equivalent to a month of household expenditure for the typical family at the time. Additionally, a household could earn Rs. 3,500 for completing primary school and Rs. 3,750 for completing secondary school up to grade 8. The beneficiary girl herself receives the final payment of Rs. 1,00,000 upon proof that she is unmarried at age 18. 

Levels of programme awareness among potential beneficiaries and the implementation quality of Dhanlakshmi in Sirhind were both high. Getting enrolled in the programme typically took less than one week, and teachers played a key role in disseminating information. In effect, researchers who attempted to interview beneficiary and non-beneficiary households in the treatment area had trouble finding eligible households who were not enrolled in Dhanlakshmi (Sekher and Ram 2015). 

Key findings

Using household survey data from the 2007-08 and 2012-13 District Level Household and Facility Survey (DLHS) and the 2015-16 National Family Health Survey (NFHS), we study the impact of the Dhanlakshmi scheme on sex ratios, girl child health and education outcomes, and maternal health. 

Figure 2 summarises the results for birth-related outcomes.  The first two rows reveal our main findings: the Dhanlakshmi scheme increased the probability of a girl birth by 5.5 percentage points (pp), while only leading to a small rise in fertility. This implies that the improvement in the sex ratio did not come from families having more children, but from parents opting to have a daughter when they would otherwise have had a son. Based on a back-of-the-envelope calculation, Dhanlakshmi was responsible for over 30% of girl births in the treatment area but only 5% of total births during the treatment period. 

The next five rows show how the girl birth effect varies by birth order and geography. Dhanlakshmi improved the prospect of a first-born girl by 4.3 pp and an additional 5.8 pp for the second child. We find no statistically significant impact on children of birth order 3 and above. The positive impact of Dhanlakshmi is concentrated in the rural areas of Fatehgarh Sahib where, in contrast to other areas in India, the sex ratio is more skewed than in urban areas. In rural areas, girl births improve by 7.4 pp – but this effect is almost 7pp lower in urban areas, implying that the effectiveness of Dhanlakshmi in urban areas is about zero. 

The last two rows present evidence that the Dhanlakshmi scheme may have been successful at shifting son preference norms: Conditional on the number of daughters from previous births, a mother’s stated preference for a son declines by about 5 pp. The post-programme effect estimates how much of the 5.5 pp improvement in the probability of a girl birth persists once the programme was discontinued and stopped enrolling new beneficiaries. The point estimate of about -2.5 pp implies that about half of the Dhanlakshmi improvement remains even when parents can no longer receive financial benefits for having a girl, suggesting that son preference norms have shifted. 

Figure 2. Estimated impacts on birth-related outcomes

Notes: i) Each circle indicates the magnitude of the effect for a given outcome and the line through it the associated 95% ‘confidence interval’. A 95% CI means that, if you were to repeat the experiment over and over with new samples, 95% of the time the calculated CI would contain the true effect. ii) Confidence intervals that do not include zero imply statistical significance at the 5% level. iii) 95% confidence intervals based on clustered standard errors.

We follow the girls born during the Dhanlakshmi implementation period until ages 5 to 7, the most recent years when we have data. We find that the programme increased immunisation rates by up to 7.1 pp, breastfeeding rates by 2.4 pp, and primary school enrollment by 4 pp. We also document that the share of 5-year-olds who are female improved by 4.5 pp, indicating that most of the girls born because of Dhanlakshmi survived until age 5, plausibly driven (at least in part) by the post-birth health and education investments. This is encouraging given that excess female mortality under age 5 is common and typically attributed to large gender gaps in health investments like immunisations. 

Older girls who were born before the programme were eligible for continuing payments that encouraged school attendance and grade completion through the end of middle school. We show that 8-14-year-old girls increase their completed years of schooling by about a third of a year. 

In addition, we examine the effects of Dhanlakshmi on mothers’ health outcomes during pregnancy and delivery. We find both improve substantially. Women are less likely to experience complications during delivery and are less likely to suffer from excessive fatigue and high blood pressure while pregnant. 

Policy implications 

Our study suggests that girl child CCTs can be an effective policy tool to fight son preference for policymakers, but that attention should be paid to the specific design features to avoid unintended adverse effects. Newer programmes already share many of Dhanlakshmi’s features, including a much less restrictive set of eligibility criteria that does not force parents to become sterilised or to limit their total number of children to benefit from the schemes. Our analysis suggests that giving parents this freedom was the right move and does not come at the cost of a large increase in fertility. Most additional girl births instead come from households that would otherwise have had a son, and older girls and mothers also benefit.

Note:

  1. The daughter deficit before birth arises when pre-natal sex determination reveals that the foetus is female, and the foetus is then aborted. While this practice has been illegal in India since 1994, it continues to be widespread (Bhalotra and Cochrane 2010).

Further Reading

  • Anukriti, S (2018), “Financial Incentives and the Fertility-Sex Ratio Trade-off”, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 10(2): 27-57.
  • Bhalotra, S and T Cochrane (2010), ‘Where Have All the Young Girls Gone? Identification of Sex Selection in India’, IZA Discussion Paper 5381.
  • Biswas, Nabaneeta, Christopher Cornwell and Laura V. Zimmermann (forthcoming), “The Power of Lakshmi: Monetary Incentives for Raising a Girl”, Journal of Human Resources.
  • Bongaarts, John and Christophe Z Guilmoto (2015), “How Many More Missing Women? Excess Female Mortality and Prenatal Sex Selection, 1970–2050”, Population and Development Review, 41(2): 241-269.
  • Sekher, TV and F Ram (2015), ‘Conditional Cash Transfers for Girls in India: Assessment of a Girl Child Promotion Scheme from Beneficiary Perspective’, Report, International Institute for Population Sciences.
  • Sen, Amartya (2010), “More than 100 Million Women Are Missing”, Women's Global Health and Human Rights: 99-112.

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