Should social registries be used to decide who receives cash transfers for women? The answer depends on the purpose of the transfer. If the scheme is income support, a registry can help identify eligible households. If the transfer is meant to recognise unpaid domestic and care work, or strengthen women’s control over money, household poverty filters weaken the case for the scheme.
Social registries and changing poverty
The World Bank defines social registries as information systems that support outreach, intake, registration, and assessment of potential eligibility for social programmes. They are entry points into welfare schemes, not merely databases. Leite et al. describe them as systems with a social policy role and an operational role. The distinction is useful because a registry built only for verification can become an exclusion device. One built for inclusion must allow registration, correction, appeal and outreach.
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This is especially relevant in India. Desai et al., using India Human Development Survey data from 2004-05, 2011-12 and 2022-24, show that households move in and out of poverty as the economy grows. A welfare database fixed at one point in time will miss some who fall into distress later and retain some who have moved out. That argues for registries that can be updated, corrected and used during shocks.
Social registries are now common. The World Bank says 62 countries had operationalised them by 2024, covering 1.1 billion people. Brazil’s Cadastro Único, linked to Bolsa Família, remains the best-known example. It shows both the promise and the limits of such systems. A registry can improve targeting and coordination, but it cannot decide the moral purpose of a welfare transfer.
India’s social registries
India already has registry-like systems. The Union government launched e-Shram in August 2021 as an Aadhaar-seeded national database of unorganised workers. By December 19, 2024, it had more than 30.48 crore registrations. Workers aged 16-59 can register if they meet the eligibility criteria; the official FAQ also says the database may be used in emergency or pandemic-like situations.
Rajasthan’s Bhamashah scheme began in 2008 and was relaunched in 2014. A World Bank note says around 50 lakh women were enrolled in the initial phase and 29 lakh accounts were opened. The scheme later became an end-to-end platform for cash and non-cash benefits. Karnataka’s Kutumba takes another route. It is an entitlement management system being developed into an integrated social information system. Its base is the Public Distribution System database, with other government databases linked to it.
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The contrast is useful. Rajasthan relied on a large enrolment exercise. Karnataka built on existing administrative data and allowed updates through the system. For states, the second route is usually cheaper and less disruptive, especially when PDS, pensions, land, caste, disability and income records already exist. The risk is poor data quality. That risk does not disappear through a survey; it has to be handled through correction, verification and appeal.
Cash transfers to women need a clear purpose
Unconditional cash transfers to women have spread across state politics. Kotiswaran and Jana estimate that about 118 million adult women in 12 states receive such transfers, with more states promising similar schemes. Their work also finds no evidence, from research across five states, that such transfers discourage women’s education or paid work, or reinforce the gendered division of labour.
There are three broad arguments for these transfers. The first is income support. The second is recognition of unpaid domestic and care work. The third is women’s agency through direct control over a predictable sum of money. These are different claims. They cannot all be handled through the same eligibility logic.
If the transfer is income support, social registries fit the job. Household income, landholding, employment status, ration card status, disability, age and other markers can help identify who should receive the money. The registry should still be open to revision because poor households are not a fixed population.
If the transfer is payment for unpaid domestic and care work, the case for targeting is weaker. Women across income classes perform such work. Poor women may face harsher constraints, but household poverty is not the basis on which the work exists. A transfer justified as recognition should therefore be broad-based, with few exclusions. If it is filtered through household assets, income certificates or land records, the design changes the purpose of the scheme.
The same applies to agency. A woman’s control over money is shaped by marriage, inheritance, work, mobility and household bargaining power. These do not map neatly onto a poverty line. A scheme designed for agency should avoid rules that make access depend on male relatives, local certification or repeated documentation.
Maharashtra, West Bengal and women’s cash transfers
Maharashtra and West Bengal show how state governments are now resolving this question in practice. Maharashtra made e-KYC compulsory for beneficiaries of the Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin scheme in 2025. The scheme pays ₹1,500 a month to eligible women. A later report said the beneficiary count fell from 2.4 crore to nearly 1.7 crore after the April 30 e-KYC deadline, though officials said the reduction also reflected eligibility violations such as income-tax status, age and overlap with other schemes.
The Maharashtra case is not a simple story of digital cleaning. Reports from Pune described Aadhaar-bank linking problems, incorrect entries and e-KYC errors that delayed payments for eligible women. The state then asked district collectors to use anganwadi workers for field verification so genuine beneficiaries were not excluded because of procedural mistakes.
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West Bengal has moved in a similar direction through its socialregistry.wb.gov.in portal. Reports say the Annapurna Bhandar scheme, which replaces Lakshmir Bhandar, offers ₹3,000 a month to eligible women through DBT, with registration and status checks routed through the state portal. The eligibility filters include age, government employment, pension and income-tax status.
Both states are treating women’s cash transfers as targeted income support. Once that decision is made, a social registry is a defensible tool. The deeper issue is that the design has already chosen one justification over the others.
Building social registries without exclusion
States should build social registries, but they should not confuse database construction with welfare design. The cheaper route is to begin with existing administrative records, as Karnataka has done, rather than wait for a fresh census-style exercise. Voluntary enrolment alone will leave out the most vulnerable. Migrant workers, homeless women, widows, newly married women, disabled persons and those without stable documents will not always find their way to a portal.
A credible registry must therefore have four features: regular updating, assisted enrolment, field verification and a working appeals process. It should show beneficiaries why they were rejected or removed. It should allow correction without forcing people to start from the beginning. It should use local workers for outreach, but pay them for the work.
Cash transfers should also sit inside a wider policy for women across the life cycle. Kotiswaran and Jana argue that transfers need support from care infrastructure, financial literacy, predictable payments, grievance systems, school-level education on the division of labour, subsidised kitchen technologies, community kitchens and crèches. That is the right way to read the limits of cash. A monthly transfer can ease a constraint. It cannot, by itself, change the distribution of unpaid work.
Social registries can improve delivery when states know what they are trying to deliver. They cannot rescue a confused scheme. If women’s cash transfers are income support, targeting through a registry is consistent. If they are recognition for unpaid care work or a claim to economic agency, governments should say so and design them with far fewer gates.
Bornali Bhandari is a Professor and Co-Director of the Centre for Gender and Macroeconomy at NCAER.