A Comparative Evaluation of Kanyashree Prakalpa (Government of West Bengal) and Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (Government of India)
Abstract: This article undertakes a comparative policy evaluation of two flagship government interventions targeting girls’ education in India: Kanyashree Prakalpa (KP), a conditional cash transfer scheme introduced by the Government of West Bengal in 2013, and Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP), a tri-ministerial national campaign launched by the Government of India in 2015. Drawing on data from parliamentary committee reports, Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) audits, the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), peer-reviewed impact evaluations and official budget documents, the article argues that KP represents a structurally superior model of gender-focused social policy due to its direct incentive architecture and measurable enrolment outcomes. By contrast, BBBP’s disproportionate allocation of public funds to media advocacy, at the expense of substantive programmatic delivery, renders it an instructive case of policy capture by optics. The article concludes with recommendations for redirecting communication expenditure toward structural educational investments.
Introduction
The question of how the state ought to intervene in the education of girls from economically marginalised households has generated a substantial body of scholarship in development economics, feminist political economy, and public policy analysis. Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes, pioneered in Latin America and subsequently adopted across the Global South, occupy a central position in this literature as demand-side instruments designed to correct market failures that produce suboptimal educational investments in female children. India’s federal structure has produced a heterogeneous landscape of such interventions, varying considerably in design logic, delivery architecture, and distributional outcomes. Two programmes merit particular scrutiny in this context: the West Bengal government’s Kanyashree Prakalpa (KP), introduced in October 2013, and the Central government’s Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP), launched in January 2015. While both ostensibly pursue convergent goals, namely the reduction of gender-based educational disadvantage and the prevention of early marriage, the similarities are largely superficial. A granular examination of their respective budgetary structures, implementation records, and empirically documented outcomes reveals a significant divergence between a scheme grounded in institutional economic logic and one that has prioritised the politics of optics over the substance of delivery.
This article proceeds as follows. Section II situates both programmes within the theoretical framework of CCT design and awareness-based interventions. Section III conducts a comparative budgetary analysis. Section IV evaluates empirical outcomes using available survey and administrative data. Section V presents a critical synthesis of the evidence, with particular attention to the opportunity costs of BBBP’s advertising expenditure. Section VI concludes with policy recommendations oriented toward structural improvements in public school infrastructure, teacher recruitment, and targeted CCT delivery.
Programme Architecture and Theoretical Underpinnings
Conditional cash transfer programmes are grounded in the principal-agent framework of welfare economics, which holds that transfers linked to behavioural conditions, such as school attendance or delayed marriage, correct the misalignment between household-level incentives and socially optimal human capital investments. The welfare economics literature consistently identifies economic precarity as the primary driver of both early marriage and female school dropout in South Asian contexts. Poverty imposes a dual burden on families: the direct cost of education and the opportunity cost of foregone labour or dowry-related calculations. CCTs that address this cost structure directly, through cash disbursements conditional on enrolment and attendance, have demonstrated strong positive effects on secondary enrolment in evaluations from Mexico’s Progresa, Brazil’s Bolsa Familia, and Bangladesh’s Female Secondary School Assistance Programme (World Bank 2009; Duflo 2012).
Kanyashree Prakalpa adheres closely to this design logic. The scheme provides two tiers of cash support: an annual scholarship designated K1, originally set at Rs. 500 and subsequently revised to Rs. 1,000, for unmarried girls aged 13 to 18 enrolled in Classes VIII to XII; and a one-time grant designated K2 of Rs. 25,000, disbursed upon the beneficiary attaining 18 years of age while remaining unmarried and continuing in education. Eligibility is conditional on minimum 60 per cent attendance and family income below Rs. 1.20 lakh per annum, though this income ceiling was subsequently removed to broaden coverage (Government of West Bengal 2013; Grokipedia 2026). The scheme is implemented through over 16,000 schools and institutions and the transfers are disbursed directly to beneficiaries’ bank accounts, reducing leakage and intermediary capture.
BBBP, by contrast, does not constitute a CCT programme in any technically precise sense. It is classified by its nodal ministry, the Ministry of Women and Child Development, as a ‘campaign’ and ‘awareness initiative’, jointly administered in convergence with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the Ministry of Education. The programme operates through district-level task forces, Intensive Block Level Interventions, and media campaigns, and its primary stated instrument of change is the generation of positive social attitudes toward the girl child (Government of India 2015). This ideational approach to behaviour change is theoretically distinct from the incentive-compatible architecture of CCTs. While awareness campaigns are not without value in altering discriminatory social norms, the development economics literature cautions against conflating information provision with structural behavioural change, particularly in the absence of accompanying income transfers or infrastructure investments (Duflo 2012; Banerjee and Duflo 2011).
Budgetary Analysis: Allocation, Utilisation, and the Advertising Premium
An analysis of the budgetary structure of both programmes reveals a fundamental asymmetry between stated objectives and actual expenditure patterns. In the case of BBBP, multiple parliamentary and audit bodies have documented an extraordinary concentration of scheme expenditure in media advocacy rather than programmatic delivery. The Sixth Report of the Parliamentary Committee on Empowerment of Women (2021-22), presented to the Lok Sabha on 4 August 2022, found that of the total Rs. 622.48 crore released to states under BBBP between 2016 and 2021, states had deployed approximately 78.91 per cent, or Rs. 491.10 crore, exclusively on advertising and media campaigns (Committee on Empowerment of Women 2022; Scroll.in 2021). The same report noted that only Rs. 156.46 crore of the Rs. 848 crore total budget was spent on actual programmatic implementation over the five-year period, and that the nodal ministry possessed no disaggregated data on state-level expenditure across education, health, and welfare sub-heads. Separately, data tabled in the Lok Sabha in January 2019 by the Minister of State for Women and Child Development disclosed that of Rs. 684 crore allocated to BBBP from 2014-15 to 2018-19, Rs. 364.66 crore, representing approximately 56 per cent, had been expended on publicity and advertising, while only Rs. 159.18 crore was distributed to states and districts (National Herald India 2019).
The CAG’s state-level audits corroborate this pattern at the subnational level. In Punjab, out of Rs. 6.36 crore released by the Centre during 2014-16, only Rs. 0.91 crore was utilised for programmatic purposes as of March 2016, while the auditors also noted that the Sex Ratio at Birth had deteriorated in at least four districts covered under the scheme (CAG 2017; Millennium Post 2017). In Haryana, the CAG found that the percentage of girls enrolled in secondary education in selected districts had actually declined in 2015-16 relative to 2014-15, directly contradicting the programme’s stated enrolment targets (The Wire 2017).
The budgetary record of Kanyashree Prakalpa presents a contrasting picture. The scheme’s design ensures that the preponderant share of expenditure is constituted by direct transfers to beneficiaries. By the time of the United Nations Public Service Award ceremony at The Hague in June 2017, the West Bengal government had disbursed approximately USD 500 million directly to beneficiaries through their bank accounts and had enrolled over 40 lakh adolescent girls in the scheme (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2017). The West Bengal Budget for 2023-24 reported total coverage of 81 lakh girls (The Hindu 2024). The state government’s allocation to Kanyashree has grown progressively, reflecting the scheme’s conversion into an institutionalised entitlement within the state’s social protection architecture. The contrast with BBBP’s implementation structure is instructive: whereas Kanyashree’s budgetary logic requires that funds flow directly to households, BBBP’s design created structural incentives for states to concentrate spending on visible, low-accountability advocacy activities rather than on distributable transfers or service delivery improvements.
Outcomes Assessment: Enrolment, Child Marriage, and Learning
The impact evaluation literature on Kanyashree Prakalpa provides robust evidence of positive effects on secondary school enrolment and some reduction in early dropout rates, though the evidence on learning outcomes and child marriage rates is more nuanced. Chakraborty and Bhatt (2023), published in Feminist Economics, employ a difference-in-differences identification strategy exploiting programme timing and find that eligible girls are 12 per cent more likely to be enrolled in secondary school and 7 per cent more likely to complete higher secondary education, with programme participation associated with approximately five additional months of schooling (Chakraborty and Bhatt 2023). A related study published in the Journal of Development Economics documents significant gains in enrolment but notes a concurrent decline in standardised learning outcomes, attributing this in part to lower classroom availability and higher teacher absenteeism in government schools that absorbed the enrolment surge (Mukherjee and Ray 2023). This finding underscores a structural limitation to which this article returns in the concluding section.
The evidence on child marriage is more sobering. Despite covering 81 lakh girls, the NFHS-5 (2019-21) records that approximately 41 to 42 per cent of women aged 20-24 in West Bengal were married before the age of 18, placing the state among the three worst performers nationally alongside Bihar and Tripura (UNFPA India 2022; IIPS and ICF 2022). The NFHS-5 National Report further notes that the rate of child marriage in West Bengal showed no statistically significant decline between NFHS-4 and NFHS-5 (IIPS and ICF 2022). These data indicate that while KP has demonstrably improved enrolment and reduced dropout at secondary school level, it has not single-handedly resolved the deep structural and normative determinants of child marriage in rural Bengal, particularly in flood-prone and migrant-source districts such as Malda, Murshidabad, and North Dinajpur where the practice is most concentrated.
BBBP’s outcomes record is considerably weaker even on its primary stated metric of improving the Child Sex Ratio (CSR) and Sex Ratio at Birth (SRB). CAG reports for Haryana and Punjab identified SRB deterioration in multiple scheme districts relative to baseline values. In Panipat, Haryana, which had the distinction of being the site of BBBP’s inaugural launch ceremony, the SRB fell from 892 to 881 against a programme target of 902 (The Wire 2017). The sex ratio at birth nationally improved marginally from 919 to 927 per 1,000 male births between NFHS-4 and NFHS-5, but attribution to BBBP is highly contested given the simultaneous operation of multiple state and national programmes targeting gender equity, judicial enforcement of the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, and broader secular trends in fertility transition. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Human Resource Development reported that in the financial year 2016-17, only Rs. 5 crore of the Rs. 43 crore total allocation for BBBP was properly utilised, a figure suggesting institutional dysfunction extending well beyond advertising skewness (Wikipedia 2025).
Analysis: The Opportunity Cost of Symbolic Politics
The comparative evidence assembled above permits a critical analytical observation that extends beyond a simple juxtaposition of programme performance metrics. BBBP’s advertising-intensive expenditure pattern represents not merely inefficiency but a specific form of policy substitution: the replacement of substantive service delivery with communicative performance. Political economy frameworks for understanding social policy in democratic developmental states suggest that governments facing short electoral time horizons have incentives to invest in high-visibility, attribution-dense activities, such as national advertising campaigns branded with the Prime Minister’s image, in preference to long-cycle investments in infrastructure and human capital whose returns are difficult to credit to any specific administration (Keefer and Khemani 2005). BBBP’s trajectory conforms closely to this model.
The Rs. 364.66 crore expended on advertising under BBBP between 2014-15 and 2018-19 alone represents, by any reasonable counterfactual calculus, a substantial foregone investment in the very structural determinants of girls’ educational disadvantage that the programme ostensibly targets. The Parliamentary Standing Committee itself recommended that the government focus on ‘planned expenditure allocation for sectoral interventions in education and health’ rather than media campaigns (The Quint 2022). To contextualise the quantum: the annual K1 scholarship under Kanyashree is disbursed at Rs. 1,000 per girl. The BBBP advertising expenditure for the five-year period could, at that rate, have funded annual scholarships for approximately 36 lakh additional girls. Alternatively, it could have financed the construction of several thousand additional classrooms in under-resourced government schools, addressing the structural bottleneck that Mukherjee and Ray (2023) identify as the mechanism suppressing learning quality gains despite enrolment increases.
The pupil-teacher ratio in government secondary schools in states where BBBP was most heavily concentrated remains significantly above the norms specified under the Right to Education Act 2009. In Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, for instance, secondary schools in rural areas frequently record pupil-teacher ratios exceeding 45:1, well above the mandated 30:1 ceiling (UDISE 2021-22). Teacher absenteeism, infrastructure deficits including the absence of functional toilets in a non-trivial proportion of schools, and the shortage of trained female teachers in rural areas constitute supply-side barriers to girls’ sustained school participation that no amount of awareness-generating television advertising can remediate. Kanyashree’s design, while primarily demand-side in its architecture, at least directly addresses the economic disincentive at the household level.
BBBP, by concentrating on ideational change while neglecting supply-side investments, constructed an intervention that was structurally insufficient even on its own terms.
It is necessary to register a degree of analytical balance. KP has itself been criticised for generating perverse incentive effects in the marriage economy of rural Bengal: studies have noted instances where families strategically enrolled daughters to capture K2 transfers before arranging early marriages after the disbursal date, effectively instrumentalising the scheme without internalising its emancipatory intent (EPW Commentary 2018). The scheme’s limited impact on learning quality, documented by Mukherjee and Ray (2023), further indicates that cash transfers are necessary but not sufficient instruments for educational transformation in resource-constrained state school systems. These limitations are real and must be acknowledged. They do not, however, alter the comparative verdict: a programme with demonstrable positive enrolment effects, direct household transfer architecture, international recognition, and over 81 lakh beneficiaries represents a categorically more credible policy instrument than a scheme that consumed the majority of its public funds in media advocacy while its core objective metrics deteriorated in key districts.
Conclusion and Policy Recommendations
The comparative evaluation presented in this article yields several conclusions of significance for the design of gender-sensitive education policy in India. First, demand-side cash transfers with clear conditionality structures, as demonstrated by Kanyashree Prakalpa and corroborated by the global CCT literature, generate measurable improvements in secondary school enrolment among girls from economically marginalised households. The political and institutional resources devoted to such programmes are not wasted, provided the transfer architecture is intact and delivery mechanisms are functional. Second, awareness-based campaigns that substitute media expenditure for programmatic delivery represent a poor investment of scarce public resources, irrespective of their communicative reach. BBBP’s record confirms the theoretical prediction that campaigns disconnected from material incentive structures and supply-side investments cannot durably alter the behaviours they target. Third, the opportunity cost of BBBP’s advertising premium is not merely financial but developmental: the foregone investment in school infrastructure, teacher recruitment, and targeted scholarships represents a real and calculable loss in girls’ educational attainment.
On the basis of this analysis, the following policy recommendations are submitted for consideration. First, the BBBP scheme should be fundamentally restructured away from media advocacy and toward a conditional transfer model, drawing explicitly on the Kanyashree architecture and adapting it to the state-specific demographic and institutional contexts of high-burden districts. The Programme convergence mechanism should prioritise integration with school infrastructure investments, especially in aspirational districts where SRB and CSR remain below national averages. Second, the central and state governments should significantly increase the teacher-pupil ratio norm compliance rate in secondary schools in gender-critical districts, recognising that enrolment gains induced by CCTs will fail to translate into learning improvements in the absence of adequate pedagogical capacity. Third, third-party impact evaluations of both KP and any restructured BBBP should be institutionalised with the frequency and methodological rigour necessary for adaptive policy management, and their findings should be placed in the public domain through parliamentary processes. Fourth, the political economy of social policy advertising requires statutory regulation: the Parliamentary Standing Committee’s recommendation that the Ministry of Women and Child Development develop an online management information system for real-time expenditure monitoring, with mandatory social audits at the district level, should be enacted without further delay.
The contrast between Kanyashree Prakalpa and Beti Bachao Beti Padhao is, at its core, a contrast between two philosophies of the state’s relationship with its most vulnerable citizens. One philosophy holds that the state must materially alter the conditions under which households make decisions about girls’ lives, accepting that this requires sustained financial commitment and institutional patience. The other holds that it is sufficient to signal intent through the megaphone of the national media, generating discursive change as a proxy for structural transformation. The evidence assembled here suggests, unambiguously, that the former philosophy is not only normatively superior but empirically more effective.
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RAAH does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of RAAH.
