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Lakshmi Das and her daughter Jayanti sell sweets from door to door. At least four days a week, Lakshmi, with two heavily loaded bags in both hands, travels the 115 kilometres to Kolkata from Dhoramari, near the Bangladesh border. It takes three hours one way. Lakshmi was a beneficiary of Lakshmir Bhandar, the Trinamool Congress government’s Rs 1,500 cash transfer scheme for women, but no longer gets the money now that she has turned 60 years old.

But her daughter, Jayanti, who is over 30, unmarried and has multiple physical illnesses, gets it. “I spend Rs 1,500 on buying my medicines. Those are costly,” Jayanti says.

“But after my allowance stopped, I can only buy half of the medicines possible with this sum of money,” says Lakshmi. Lakshmi is the sole breadwinner for her family of three, with a monthly income of Rs 6,000 to Rs 7,000. Both mother and daughter fear that if this scheme is discontinued, many women like them will face hardships in managing expenses.

Lakshmi Mandal. Photo: By arrangement.

Lakshmi Mandal, a 50-year-old resident of Chetla in Kolkata, works as a house-help for a family in south Kolkata. Her candid submission was, “Whatever I earn is spent on running my family. My son does not have any income, and my husband too was a non-earning member until recently. So from medical expenses to social occasions, this money is a bit of support.”

Lakshmi lives in a slum and is worried that if the scheme stops giving her money, then it is her own medicines that she will have to stop buying. “We get nothing from the health centre. I have to buy everything from outside,” she says.

Two women from Birbhum’s Nanoor and Kirnahar, in their late 30s, wanted to be identified only by their first names, Saleha and Apa. According to Saleha, she saves this money. “I want my daughter to study as long as she wants. My husband takes away all my hard-earned money to run the family. He is a drunkard. He does not know I get this money,” she says.

Apa, a mother of three, studied till Class 7. Like many in the block, her husband too is a migrant labourer. She sells flowers at a nearby bus terminus, but the income is paltry. She waits for Rs 1,500 each month. But her fear is about something else and goes back to the 2024 rape and murder of a trainee doctor at a Kolkata medical college. “The R.G. Kar girl did not get justice. Just three days ago, a gang rape took place locally. One of the accused is known to the teenage schoolgirl. I am constantly afraid as I have three daughters, and my husband works in a different state,” she says.

As is well known, women voters have supported schemes like Lakshmir Bhandar in Bengal in large numbers. But is that all it takes for women to vote for the Trinamool Congress? In the first phase, 152 seats across 16 districts will go to the polls on April 23. The total electorate for Phase I is 3,60,77,171; 48.7% of them are women, amounting to 1,75,77,210 voters.

It is thus in the interest of all political........

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