We are in the midst of an unprecedented shift in India’s welfare regime. Approximately 11.3 crore (113 million) adult women in 11 states receive an unconditional cash transfer (UCT) from their respective state governments; 5 states have promised similar unconditional cash transfer schemes. While India has historically implemented a range of programs for women’s welfare before they reach adulthood or after they are 60, the recent wave of UCTs target women in their adult years, are unconditional and recognise implicitly or explicitly, women’s unpaid domestic and care work (UDCW), in compliance with United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5.4. In this seminar, we discuss the recently published policy brief by the Laws of Social Reproduction project which offers a comprehensive overview of UCT schemes, outlining the context of their introduction, their key features, and their initial impact, as well as critically analysing UCT schemes through a gendered lens and offering recommendations for how UCTs can become gender transformative.

With Discussant:

Vibhor Mathur (Research Assistant, University of Bath and Research Associate, Cardiff University)

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.