The Labharthi Turn: What Karnataka’s Gender Budget Gets Wrong

CPPR Media&PR at May 8, 2026

The Category A Story: Real Cash, Limited Change

Karnataka has genuinely expanded what it spends directly on women. Category A allocations schemes, where 100% of the benefit is for women, grew from ₹55 crore in 2021-22 to ₹401 crore by 2025-26. Much of this is the Gruha Lakshmi scheme, the Congress government’s cash transfer of ₹2,000 a month to women homemakers, and Shakti scheme, which gives women free rides on state buses. These are real money in real hands. Surveys suggest women spend transfer income differently from men, with more going to food, children’s education, and healthcare. The schemes are popular and not without reason.

But look at what is driving this expansion. These are consumption-smoothing transfers. They do not change what a woman owns, what she earns, or what bargaining power she holds in her household or in the labour market. They compensate women for existing within a structurally unequal economy rather than alter the structure. In Aiyar’s framing, this is compensatory welfarism: the state acknowledges that growth has not worked for most people and responds with transfers rather than transformation.

The Category B Collapse: The Mainstreaming Mirage

Category B tells a starker story, in which 30–99% of the benefit reaches women. This is where gender mainstreaming is supposed to show up: in public works, in housing, in skills infrastructure. Category B peaked at 51.6% of total gender-linked allocations in 2019-20, then collapsed to below 20% after 2022 and has remained there.

Some of this is a data problem. Karnataka’s own budget documentation acknowledges that Category B classification relies on assumptions in the absence of sex-disaggregated data. But the timing of the decline is suggestive. It coincides with a fiscal architecture that is increasingly organised around direct, visible, named transfers rather than the harder, less photogenic work of making general services gender-responsive. Building a women’s toilet block in every government school does not carry a minister’s photograph. A ₹2,000 transfer does.

This is the political economy of the labharthi state. Transfers are legible to voters in ways that institutional investment in education quality or public health is not. They can be branded, sequenced, and distributed in proximity to elections. The recipient knows who gave it to her. That is precisely what Aiyar means by ‘techno-patrimonialism’, which is welfare that builds loyalty to a leader rather than rights within a system.

What Gets Left Out

Karnataka’s gender budget largely does not engage with women’s labour force participation, which stood at 43.6% in 2023–24 (PLFS) , a figure that masks the prevalence of informal and low-paid work. It also does not track whether women’s ownership of productive assets like land, livestock, and business capital has changed. Education allocations are substantial, yet the budget does not connect them to outcomes such as girls’ secondary completion or women’s graduate‑level employment. PLFS data shows a national literacy rate of 73.7% for those aged five and above, with only a modest gap between men and women; however, this relatively high literacy has not yet translated into strong participation in the labour force or secure, well-paid work for women

The Pulikkamath and Degaonkar (2024) review of Karnataka’s decade-long gender budgeting exercise makes a similar observation: the institutional machinery is in place, but the link between allocation and outcomes is missing. This is not accidental. Outcome tracking requires accountability, and accountability means acknowledging when things have not worked. The labharthi framework has no obvious use for that kind of reckoning.

The question worth asking

None of this means Karnataka’s gender transfers are without value. They are not. For a woman in a low-income household, ₹2,000 a month and a free bus pass are not small things. The question is what we want gender budgeting to do. If the goal is to reduce women’s immediate vulnerability and make deprivation a little less sharp, then Karnataka’s expanding Category A is doing something real.

But if gender budgeting was supposed to be, as its original architects intended, a tool for restructuring fiscal policy so that the economy itself becomes less unequal for women, then the current direction falls short. The labharthi receives. The citizen transforms. Karnataka’s gender budget, at least as currently designed, is more comfortable with the former.

Ashmita Mitra is a Research Intern at Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR).

Views expressed by the authors are personal and need not reflect or represent the views of the Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR).

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The Labharthi Turn: What Karnataka’s Gender Budget Gets Wrong

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