Dhanalakshmi Scheme - Insurance Coverage for Girl Child

A girl’s birth should be celebrated with promise not met with bias or burden. The Dhanalakshmi Scheme was designed to do exactly that: it offered financial incentives and insurance cover to families with girls, aiming to reduce female-foeticide, prevent early marriage and support a girl’s upbringing.

Open Demat account and Unlock smarter investing today!

What is the Dhanalakshmi Scheme

• The Dhanalakshmi Scheme was launched on 3 March 2008 by the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD) as a “conditional cash transfer + insurance cover” programme for girl children.
• Its core aim was to incentivise families to value girl children, ensure their survival and education and discourage practices like female-foeticide and child marriage.
• It operated on a milestone-based benefit model families received financial support when the girl met certain conditions (birth registration, immunisation, school enrollment/completion, remaining unmarried till adulthood, etc.) plus life-insurance cover as additional security.

Objectives of the Scheme

The Dhanalakshmi Scheme aimed to:

• Reverse gender bias by making the birth of a girl financially neutral (or positive), through incentives.
• Encourage birth registration, full immunisation and proper healthcare for girl children.
• Promote education of girl children up to at least middle/high school.
• Discourage early / underage marriage by offering benefits only if the girl remained unmarried until she reached adulthood (age 18).
• Provide life-insurance cover for the girl child, giving financial security to the family and offering a sense of protection to the girl.

In short: the scheme tried to address both immediate socioeconomic pressures and long-term welfare for the girl child.

Who Was Eligible for Dhanalakshmi Scheme

• The scheme targeted girl children born on or after 8 November 2008 (or launched after that date) in the pilot-areas.
• Beneficiaries had to be residents / citizens of India the scheme did not discriminate on caste, religion, or income.
• There was no explicit cap on number of girl children per family each eligible girl could be covered under the scheme (in pilot implementation).
• Families needed to ensure certain conditions: child’s birth registered within time, immunisation as per schedule, school enrollment/continuation, and importantly that the girl remains unmarried till 18 years.

Because Dhanalakshmi was implemented as a pilot in only some districts/blocks of select states, effective benefit depended also on geographic eligibility.

What Were the Benefits under Dhanalakshmi Scheme

The scheme provided two broad categories of benefits: Cash / Financial Incentives (Conditional Cash Transfers) and Insurance Cover + Maturity Incentive.

Conditional Cash Transfers & Milestone Benefits

Depending on the girl child’s age and life stage, the scheme offered:

• Initial incentive at birth / registration: For eligible girl children, an initial grant was provided (for example, many sources note ₹5,000 as the birth-incentive amount).
• Immunisation incentive: For children between 6 weeks to 24 months, vaccination doses under the Universal Immunisation Programme were incentivised overall immunisation incentive went up to certain amounts (e.g. cumulative ₹1,250 per child).
• Education-linked incentives: Families received periodic cash incentives contingent on school enrollment and continuation: e.g. annual/one-time grants at various class levels to support education expenses.
• Incentive on safe maturity (adulthood + unmarried status): On the girl reaching adulthood (e.g. 18 years) and remaining unmarried, an insurance-linked maturity benefit was planned. This was intended as a symbolic and financial support at adulthood, contingent on social norm compliance (no child-marriage).

These layered benefits were meant to make raising a girl child more attractive to families ensuring survival, health, education, and delayed marriage.

Insurance Cover / Life Cover

• Under the scheme’s insurance component typically administered via a life-insurance provider (for example, Life Insurance Corporation of India, LIC)  the girl child was provided life cover. If the girl survived to adulthood and remained unmarried, a maturity benefit (lump-sum) was to be paid.
• This life-insurance element was aimed at giving a sense of security both to the girl and her family and countering the mindset that girl child is a “financial burden.”

Collectively, the cash incentives + insurance + conditional milestones made Dhanalakshmi a comprehensive welfare attempt from infancy to adulthood.

Implementation : Where and How It Was Rolled Out

• Dhanalakshmi was launched as a pilot scheme in eleven blocks across seven states that had adverse child-sex ratios and high prevalence of female-foeticide / child-marriage.
• The selection of blocks was based on demographic deficits (skewed sex ratio), aiming to target areas most in need.
• Implementation involved local agencies: registration at birth, health & immunization tracking, school enrollment verification, certificate of unmarried status at 18, etc. Various welfare departments, anganwadi workers, schools and govt infrastructure were involved.

However, it’s important to note that the scheme was discontinued at the central level. As per government records, the scheme was withdrawn from 1 April 2013 because several states had by then launched their own, more attractive girl-child welfare programmes.

What Changed: Is the Scheme Still Active?

• As of the last update, Dhanalakshmi is no longer active as a central welfare scheme.
• Its discontinuation was due to the fact that various states introduced their own localized girl-child welfare or incentive schemes potentially more expansive or better tailored to local contexts.
• However, Dhanalakshmi remains an important policy model used in academic and social-policy discussions for what a girl-child welfare & insurance framework could look like.

Thus, while you cannot apply for Dhanalakshmi nationwide today, learning about it remains relevant especially for understanding the evolution of girl-child schemes in India.

Pros & Challenges (Lessons from Dhanalakshmi)

What Worked / Strengths

• Provided a multi-dimensional safety net: health (immunization), education, financial incentives and insurance all layered to ensure a girl’s holistic welfare.
• Offered conditional incentives that aligned family behaviour with social welfare delayed marriage, education retention, birth registration.
• Targeted regions most vulnerable to gender discrimination / skewed sex ratios focusing resources where they were most needed.
• Created awareness and helped shift social mindsets about the value of a girl child, through tangible economic benefits.

Challenges / Criticism / Limitations

• Since it was implemented only in selected blocks as a pilot coverage was limited, not nationwide. Many girls/families remained outside its ambit.
• Administrative complexity tracking immunization, education, marital status until age 18, documentation verification made implementation and monitoring difficult.
• Delay or irregular disbursement risk: conditional transfer schemes often suffer from delays, missing records, bureaucratic inertia.
• Incentives might not always offset long-term socio-economic pressures or deeply entrenched social biases against girl children.
• With discontinuation, beneficiaries in later birth cohorts lost eligibility raising issues of sustainability and continuity.

What Dhanalakshmi Taught Us: Significance & Legacy

• Dhanalakshmi demonstrated how conditional cash transfers + social welfare + insurance cover can be combined to address gender discrimination, child-marriage, and girl-child neglect.
• It influenced later girl-child schemes (by states) providing a template for conditional incentives, milestone-based benefits, and integrated welfare programming.
• As a pilot program, it offered lessons on implementation challenges, need for robust monitoring, and importance of scalable infrastructure when designing welfare for vulnerable groups.
• Its discontinuation underscores that welfare initiatives must evolve with changing social-economic context; local-level schemes with better resource commitment sometimes outgrow centralized pilot efforts.

For researchers, policymakers, NGOs Dhanalakshmi remains a valuable case-study in design and execution of welfare for girl-child empowerment.