Published Mar 11, 2026 | 8:00 AM ⚊ Updated Mar 11, 2026 | 8:00 AM
Congress launching the Shakti scheme
Synopsis: When mobility, liquidity, and access to work begin to reinforce each other, the guarantees will no longer function only as instruments of relief but will begin to reshape the conditions under which women live, move, work, and make decisions. Such a shift would tip the scales of Karnataka’s welfare architecture from relief toward transformation.
Karnataka’s latest budget once again places the state’s five guarantee schemes at the centre of its
welfare architecture, with approximately 11% of the total budget allocated to it.
Over the past year, these programmes have come to define the everyday interface between the government and lakhs of households across the state. The free bus rides for women, income support for women-headed households, electricity subsidies, food support, and unemployment assistance together represent one of the most ambitious state-level welfare commitments in recent years.
Public debate on these schemes often remains confined within a narrow fiscal framework, with critics characterising them as populist spending that strains the exchequer and weakens development spending. That concern cannot be brushed aside lightly, since any serious welfare regime must remain attentive to fiscal sustainability.
Yet the scale, reach, and social effect of Karnataka’s guarantees suggest that they are steadily becoming a foundational social floor for a large section of the state’s population.
It is for this reason that the conversation needs to move beyond the familiar binary of welfare
versus development. A growing body of impact evaluations has, over the past year, begun asking a deeper and more relevant question: can these guarantees evolve from instruments of immediate relief into policies that reshape women’s economic participation, mobility, and autonomy? That, surely, is a more meaningful question for Karnataka today than the repetitive argument over whether the schemes are politically popular.
Consider Gruha Lakshmi, which provides ₹2,000 a month to women heads of households. While at one level it is a straightforward cash transfer, at another it represents public recognition of the unpaid care economy that sustains households every single day without commensurate economic acknowledgement.
When money reaches women directly, its effects extend beyond household consumption, since direct transfers can strengthen women’s financial autonomy and increase their role in everyday financial decisions within the household. In that sense, Gruha Lakshmi is more than a subsidy, because it also shifts who holds liquidity within the household and, with it, shifts everyday power.
The Shakti scheme offers another important lesson, because free bus travel for women is often
discussed only as a transport subsidy, even though its wider significance lies in the way it directly
reduces transport poverty, which has long functioned as a barrier to women’s entry into labour
markets, services, and public life. Mobility is not merely about movement, but an economic
condition in itself, since a woman’s ability to seek work, travel for paid employment, attend
interviews, access training, or sustaining informal sector livelihoods is deeply shaped by whether
mobility is affordable and reliable.
Across several cities and towns in Karnataka, improved mobility has already begun to reshape how women access employment opportunities and navigate public space. This matters because Karnataka’s guarantees are best understood as part of an interconnected policy ecosystem rather than as five stand-alone schemes.
Shakti expands access to work and public space, Gruha Lakshmi improves household liquidity and can support a woman’s ability to remain in, search for, or prepare for work, Yuva Nidhi seeks, at least in principle, to ease the transition into employment, and Anna Bhagya and Gruha Jyothi reduce pressure on basic household expenditure. Each scheme addresses a different economic constraint, but their deeper potential lies in the way they reinforce one another.
That is where the next phase of policy thinking should begin. When guarantees operate in silos,
they produce relief at the level of individual schemes, whereas linking them to wider systems of
opportunity makes their impact far more durable.
Karnataka must, therefore, now think beyond delivery and toward convergence. Linking guarantees with self-help groups, access to formal and informal credit, local skilling pathways, safe first-and-last-mile transport, childcare infrastructure, and local employment ecosystems can deepen the transformative effect of welfare and allow these schemes to function as part of a larger framework of women’s economic participation.
The question of fiscal pressure, of course, remains real, and Karnataka cannot ignore debt, revenue pressures, or competing development needs; yet even this debate requires greater nuance. At a time when Karnataka’s GSDP growth (8.1%) continues to outpace the national average, the guarantees should be viewed as a consumption-led stimulus. Transfers to low-income households do not disappear into a void, but circulate through local economies as poorer households tend to spend a larger share of what they receive on essential goods and services.
This demand effect can support local markets, sustain petty economic activity, and generate
wider multiplier effects.
Karnataka, therefore, stands at an important policy moment, because while the first phase of the
guarantee model has already succeeded in establishing administrative reach, political legitimacy, and public visibility; the next phase must focus on how this welfare architecture can expand women’s agency in a more structural sense by moving from isolated benefits to connected
opportunity.
When mobility, liquidity, and access to work begin to reinforce each other, the guarantees will no longer function only as instruments of relief but will begin to reshape the conditions under which women live, move, work, and make decisions. Such a shift would tip the scales of Karnataka’s welfare architecture from relief toward transformation.
(The writers have co-authored ‘From Guarantees to Rights: Assessing Karnataka’s Experiment
with Basic Income and Basic Services.’ Views are those of the writers. Edited by Majnu Babu).
