Picture a state election rally in 2026. The Chief Minister stands on stage and announces: ₹3,000 a month to every woman in the state, directly into her bank account. The crowd cheers. Two days later, the opposition holds its own rally. Their leader promises ₹3,500. A week later, a third formation enters and says ₹4,000. Nobody on any of those stages mentions where the money will come from. That is not a caricature. That is what actually happened — in slightly different numbers — across Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Assam, and Kerala in the 2026 election season. Every major political formation did it. The parties that criticised "revdi culture" adopted it themselves when elections demanded it.
This was not always how Indian elections worked. To understand what changed, you need to see three turning points.
The first turn happened in Tamil Nadu in the 1960s-70s. State governments there discovered that tangible, visible benefits win elections. It started with something genuinely transformative: free midday meals in schools, introduced in the 1950s and expanded over the next two decades. School enrolment shot up. Malnutrition dipped. This was welfare at its best — a public investment in children's health and education, with measurable long-term returns. But over the decades, the formula shifted. By the 2000s, state elections featured promises of free televisions, mixer-grinders, laptops, gold for brides. The items changed with each election. The logic did not: give something visible, something the voter can hold in their hand, and they will remember you at the ballot box.
The second turn came after 2014, when digital infrastructure made cash transfers easy. Aadhaar-linked bank accounts and the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) pipeline meant that for the first time, a state government could send money directly to millions of people with a single order. Before DBT, welfare meant building things — roads, schools, anganwadi centres — or running services. That took time and bureaucratic effort, and the voter often did not know whom to thank. Cash is different. Cash arrives in your account. You know exactly who sent it. And the government that sent it can time the transfer to land weeks before polling day. PM-KISAN in 2019 — ₹6,000 a year to farmers, rolled out just before the general elections — showed every political formation in the country that this works.
The third turn is the one we are living through now: the auction dynamic. Once one party in a state announces a cash transfer scheme for women, the rival has no choice but to match it or go higher. Pulling back means losing. In Jharkhand in 2024, the ruling government launched a women's cash transfer at ₹1,000 per month. The principal opposition countered at ₹2,100. The government then held a cabinet meeting and raised its own scheme to ₹2,500. Three bids before a single vote was cast. The global investment firm Nomura, in a December 2023 report, gave this pattern a name that has stuck in policy circles: competitive populism. And Nomura noted something important — this is not a left problem or a right problem. It is a system problem. Every major political formation does it.
So here we are. According to PRS Legislative Research, 12 states are now collectively spending about ₹1.68 lakh crore on women-focused cash transfer schemes. Nine states budgeted over ₹1 lakh crore on such schemes in FY25 alone — up from just two states two years earlier. The combined state subsidy bill in FY25 hit ₹3.7 lakh crore, up 26% in a single year.
The question is not whether this is happening. It is. The question is: can the states afford it, and what happens when they cannot?