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Welfare policies targeting women became a flashpoint in political debates during the recent election campaigns in Tamil Nadu. A wide range of actors – parties aligned with the NDA bloc as well as regional formations like Naam Tamizhar Katchi (NTK) and Tamizhaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) – targeted the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s large-scale cash transfer programmes. The most prominent of these schemes, directed at nearly 1.3 crore women, is officially framed as recognition of unpaid domestic labour.

Critics, however, have been unsparing. NTK leader Seeman outrightly dismissed such programmes as “freebies”, arguing that they produce political dependency rather than emancipation. Vijay, too, criticised welfare schemes, both in his films and early political statements, urging voters to reject “freebie politics”. Though it is to be noted that upon formally entering electoral competition, his party itself promised cash transfers for women, a telling sign of the political consensus welfare has achieved in Tamil Nadu.

Yet the critique of such schemes has grown too, extending well beyond political actors. The Supreme Court of India expressed concern over a “free-flowing culture of freebies”, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly attacked what he calls “revadi culture”, claiming that Bharatiya Janata Party-governed states resist such practices. This is, at best, a contentious assertion. Welfare schemes targeting women are a feature of governance across party lines, including in states under BJP rule, exposing a degree of inconsistency that rarely invites scrutiny.

Similar anxieties circulate in middle-class public discourse, where welfare spending is routinely dismissed as fiscally irresponsible or as cynical electoral populism. Taken together, these critiques share a common blind spot: the near-total absence of the woman as a political subject. Although the bulk of these so-called freebies are directed at women, women themselves are seldom treated as central agents in the debates about them. Instead, they are implicitly cast as passive beneficiaries – presumed to be easily swayed by material incentives, their electoral choices reduced to transactional responses to state largesse.

This framing is deeply problematic. It renders women voters invisible or constructs them as misled recipients, stripping their political behaviour of rationality and agency and treating welfare itself as merely an instrument for electoral gain.

However, the empirical record tells a different story. Women constitute approximately 51% of Tamil Nadu’s electorate, and parties that have delivered on welfare promises have consistently demonstrated stronger electoral durability. Political actors understand that welfare schemes have become a decisive factor in shaping women’s voting preferences, and that gender-sensitive welfare is less a form of populist expenditure than a mechanism of democratic accountability.

Yet to understand what these programmes have actually done to gender relations – and what kinds of gender politics they are producing – a more nuanced analytical framework is required. Reductive labels like “freebie” or “revadi culture” do not merely mischaracterise fiscal policy; they obscure deeper social and political implications, and, in doing so, reproduce precisely the patriarchal assumptions that render women’s political agency invisible in the first place.

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Tamil Nadu occupies a distinctive position in India’s welfare landscape. Unlike states where redistributive policy has been ad hoc or electorally expedient, Tamil Nadu’s welfare architecture is embedded in a longer tradition of social justice politics stretching back several decades. Periyar E.V. Ramasamy’s advocacy of 50% reservation for women in public institutions and elected bodies was among the earliest systematic attempts to structurally address gender inequality in the region, and its influence has shaped the state’s policy imagination ever since.

The cumulative effect of this tradition is visible in the data. Female literacy in Tamil Nadu stands at around 84%, with gross enrolment in higher education approaching 50% — both figures well above the national average. The state’s female labour force participation rate has risen to approximately 47%, notably higher than in ostensibly growth-led states such as Gujarat and Maharashtra, where market-driven development has not translated into comparable gains for women.

Tamil Nadu’s gender-sensitive public health infrastructure has delivered further structural changes: fertility rates have declined to approximately 1.4 (2025-26), significantly easing women’s maternal and childcare burdens, particularly in the absence of state-supported child care facilities. Concurrently, maternal mortality has fallen sharply and institutional deliveries are now near-universal.

These are not incidental achievements. They represent decades of intentional, gendered redistribution – a fact that is largely absent from the male-dominated political critiques of welfare that dominate current discourse. This absence is telling. Such policies have produced both intended and unintended consequences that extend well beyond electoral arithmetic: women’s increased visibility in the labour market, their greater financial autonomy and their enhanced bargaining power within the household.

That these outcomes rarely feature in critiques of “freebie culture” suggests that what is being resisted is not fiscal imprudence but the social transformations that welfare for women actually produces.

Post-1990 Union government programmes have reinforced these dynamics. MGNREGA – dismissed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as “non-growth waste”- has been effectively mobilised by women in Tamil Nadu to supplement household incomes. Self-help groups (SHGs) have similarly functioned as instruments of financial inclusion and collective agency. Studies consistently show that these interventions have strengthened women’s ability to negotiate patriarchal structures, increased their control over household expenditure, and shifted family priorities – most notably towards children’s education. The analytical point here is crucial: welfare programmes directed at women do not merely alleviate poverty; they alter the terms of gendered power relations.

It is within this long arc of social justice politics that the DMK’s recent welfare interventions must be situated – not as standalone electoral inducements or fiscal indulgences but as an extension and deepening of the Periyarist vision of gender justice. The Kalaignar Magalir Urimai Thogai is among the most explicitly feminist cash transfer programmes in India. Unlike conditional cash transfer schemes, which tie benefits to behavioural compliance and thereby reinforce existing gender norms – this is an unconditional transfer of Rs 1,000 per month, framed expressly as recognition of women’s unpaid domestic labour.

The very name of the scheme is instructive: urimai means right (not charity). Such a framing distinguishes the programme from comparable interventions elsewhere in India and, indeed, from most cash transfer programmes in the Global South, including in Brazil, where feminist articulation of this kind has been rare.

Alongside this, free bus travel for women addresses a structurally underappreciated constraint: mobility. The ability to move freely and affordably through public space is not a minor amenity but a fundamental precondition for economic participation, access to services and social visibility. Together, these measures represent a coherent attempt to defamilialise welfare: to shift the basis of women’s entitlement from their position within the family unit to their standing as autonomous citizens with claims on the state.

Early evidence suggests these interventions are producing meaningful social effects. Women have reported that Urimai Thogai has enhanced their dignity and respect within the family and in marriage. Therefore, cash transfers made on rights-based terms can reshape intra-household power dynamics in ways that go beyond their immediate economic value. Whether this amounts to a structural transformation of gender relations or remains constrained by the limits of welfare provision in the absence of universal childcare and regularised employment, is a question that requires further reflection.

In a campaign speech in Salem, Chief Minister M.K. Stalin offered what may be one of the most politically significant articulations of welfare in Tamil Nadu’s recent history. On the electoral platform, he framed the cash transfer programme not in the abstract language of rights, but in the concrete register of daily life. He described the drudgery of household work, the weight of care responsibilities and how this invisible labour forecloses women’s opportunities for self-care, productive employment and public participation.

Perhaps for the first time in an election campaign setting, women’s unpaid domestic labour was not merely acknowledged but explicitly politicised, drawing applause from both women and men in the audience.

Also read: Freebie Charge Is an Assault on Social Welfare and Rights of Citizens

Significant about Stalin’s articulation is not just what he said but how he said it. He did not anonymise women as passive beneficiaries or celebrate stereotypical notions of feminine sacrifice. Instead, he problematised the unequal distribution of domestic labour as a structural constraint on women’s participation in education, employment and formal politics. He framed freedom from domestic drudgery as a precondition, not a luxury, for women’s full citizenship.

In doing so, he foregrounded care work as a political issue in its own right, resonating strongly with Periyar’s discourse on women’s freedom and self-respect. This marks a pivotal shift in Tamil Nadu’s welfare politics from treating women as beneficiaries to recognising them as political subjects.

The early empirical evidence is encouraging. Survey data indicate that 79% of Urimai Thogai beneficiaries report improved food consumption – a concrete material gain. But the social effects of these interventions appear to extend beyond household expenditure. Women have reported enhanced dignity within the family and in marriage – an instance of how economic rights can reshape power dynamics.

Thus, the cumulative impact of Tamil Nadu’s welfare architecture, which spans education, public health, mobility and income support, has deepened women’s engagement with political processes, often in ways that exceed the reductive assumptions of a male-dominated discourse that sees them only as beneficiaries. This deepening political subjectivity, rather than mere electoral gratitude, explains why welfare has become so consequential to electoral outcomes in the state.

This welfare model has shaped a broader political common sense in Tamil Nadu. The Dravidian tradition has made it difficult to publicly declare welfare for women as fiscally wasteful or as disadvantaging men. In other words, gender-sensitive welfare is normalised as a legitimate state responsibility and this is itself a political achievement, and one that should not be taken for granted.

To be sure, the model has limits, and naming them honestly is part of taking it seriously. Cash transfers and bus passes, though substantially significant, do not on their own resolve the structural conditions that reproduce women’s unequal burden. Universal, publicly funded childcare and eldercare infrastructure, particularly for poorer households where the care burden falls most heavily upon women, remains neglected and deprioritised.

Without sustained investment in social infrastructure of these kinds, welfare for women risks remaining redistributive, not becoming genuinely gender-transformative. A more advanced and credible Dravidian Model 2.0 would need to build on existing programmes to create the conditions under which women can participate in public life with greater financial resources as well as meaningfully reduced care burdens. Changing entrenched patriarchal attitudes around shared domestic responsibility is another (more challenging) project that policy alone cannot accomplish. But policy can create the material conditions to make such changes possible.

Tamil Nadu has travelled further down this road than most states. Whether welfare politics can evolve beyond recognising women’s burdens to alleviating their care burden will depend on how deeply Dravidian ideals of gender justice are internalised across the state.

Preethi Pandian is a graduate of Law from the University of Manchester and S. Anandhi is a retired professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai.

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