India may have stumbled into one of its most consequential social experiments without fully intending to: paying women simply for being the invisible engine of the household economy. What began as scattered state-level schemes of unconditional cash transfers has, in just a few years, grown into a nationwide phenomenon touching 118 million women. The sums are small, the politics loud, and the implications profound. For decades, unpaid domestic and care work has propped up India’s economic life without ever entering its accounting systems. Women spend hours each day cooking, cleaning, caregiving and managing crises ~ labour that sustains families, frees up men for paid work, and substitutes for public services that are missing or inadequate. Yet this work has been treated as natural, expected, and essentially valueless.

The quiet flow of 1,000 to 2,500 rupees a month into women’s bank accounts ~ for those who meet the basic........

© The Statesman