Since 2020, several states have rolled out unconditional cash transfers to women at breakneck speed in the wake of assembly elections. Yet Tamil Nadu’s Kalaignar Mahalir Urimai Thittam is the first unconditional cash transfer scheme to articulate the payment as recognition of women’s unpaid domestic and care work, which paves the way for the realisation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5.4. The Laws of Social Reproduction project sought to intervene in debates on such cash transfers by testing assumptions made by governments, feminists, and welfare experts alike on the desirability of unconditional cash transfers and their impact on women’s empowerment. We undertook a mixed-methods study of the Kalaignar Mahalir Urimai Thittam in September 2023, 12 months after its launch, assessing the impact of the scheme across six key outcome indicators from a gendered perspective. In this seminar, we discuss the findings from our research in Tamil Nadu as well as the broader implications of this research for cash transfers across the country.
With Discussants:
Dr. Kripa Ananth Pur, Professor (Retd.), Madras Institute of Development Studies
Dr. Kalpana K, Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Professor Prabha Kotiswaran is Professor of Law and Social Justice at the King’s College London Dickson Poon School of Law. Her main areas of research include criminal law, transnational criminal law, feminist legal studies and sociology of law. She is the author of Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India, published by Princeton University Press (2011) and co-published by Oxford University Press, India (2011), which won the SLSA-Hart Book Prize for Early Career Academics and has been extensively reviewed by several law and inter-disciplinary journals. Her research has been funded by the AHRC, Leverhulme Trust, ESRC, European Research Council, the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University and the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School. She was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2014.
