The BJP government in Odisha is ready to roll out its flagship Subhadra scheme on September 17, marking Narendra Modi’s birthday. Targeting a massive beneficiary base of 1 crore, the scheme seeks to cover women aged 21-60 years with cash transfer of Rs 50,000 over five years, with two tranches of Rs 5,000 given annually. Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi claimed last week that the scheme would be transformative.
A key component of BJP’s election manifesto, the Subhadra Yojana has, however, turned out in an avatar fairly different from how it was promised. Before the elections, the national party had promised Rs 50,000 to beneficiaries in the form of vouchers to be encashed over two years. However, the budgeting process seems to have led to the realisation that the scheme would require significant resources and eventually ended up as Rs 50,000 cash transfer over five years.
The shift from cash vouchers to direct transfers was not just a marked departure in the scheme’s constitution, but changed its ethos too. A closer look shows that it mimics Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s Ladli Behna scheme in Madhya Pradesh that yielded the BJP huge electoral gains; it has also been replicated in Maharashtra as the Ladki Bahin Yojana.
Subhadra is a potent political weapon the BJP could use to wean women voters off rival BJD, which had showered self-help groups with largesse to strengthen its electoral heft. With 58 seats in the state assembly, the regional party remains a formidable opposition. It appears to be the reason the saffron outfit wants to employ a more populist approach and its government has approved a staggering Rs 55,825 crore outlay for the scheme from 2024-25 to 2028-29.
For a perspective, the current fiscal’s state budget size stands at Rs 2.65 lakh crore. The government has prepared an exhaustive list of exclusions to make the scheme’s delivery watertight, but Subhadra is clearly going down the path of other freebies and joining the long list left by the previous BJD regime that the BJP was so vociferously opposed to. Though the prime minister has often spoken out against a ‘revri culture’, Subhadra could end up being just another tool of competitive freebie politics unless the Majhi government makes it work otherwise.