The starting point for the study is a demographic puzzle that has haunted Indian policymakers since the census of 2001 first revealed the full scale of prenatal sex selection. Despite rising incomes, expanding education, and a proliferation of girl child welfare schemes, the number of girls born per thousand boys has stayed below natural levels in several northern and western states. Haryana, an economically prosperous state with one of the worst sex ratios in the country, became a symbolic battleground for this issue. It was in Panipat that the national Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign was launched in 2015, and the state government layered its own conditional cash transfer programme, Aapki Beti Hamari Beti, on top of existing central initiatives. The scheme offers financial incentives to families, with payments linked to the birth and continued survival and schooling of daughters, in an explicit attempt to alter the cost-benefit calculations that underlie son preference.

What distinguishes the new research is its methodological framing. Rather than conducting a fresh survey or a randomized evaluation, the authors carried out a qualitative policy comparison built entirely on secondary sources. Their evidence base spans government reports, census records, official scheme design documents, programme evaluations, and the academic literature from 2011 through 2025. This documentary approach allows them to situate Haryana’s scheme within a wider landscape of comparable interventions, including the Bhagyalakshmi scheme in Karnataka, the Ladli scheme in Delhi, the girl child protection schemes of Tamil Nadu, Kanyashree in West Bengal, and the Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana at the national level. By reading these programmes against one another, the study tries to isolate which design features, implementation choices, and contextual conditions actually move the needle on girls’ welfare.

The findings are nuanced rather than triumphant. On the positive side of the ledger, the authors conclude that incentive-based schemes have contributed to measurable improvements in the welfare of girls, including survival rates, enrolment in education, and social status. Conditional cash transfers, by attaching money to milestones such as school attendance or the delayed marriage of daughters, appear to shift household behavior at the margin, particularly among poorer families for whom the payments represent a meaningful share of income. This aligns with a broader international evidence base on financial incentives in education, which suggests that well-designed transfers can enhance outcomes when the conditions are achievable and the payments are reliable.

Yet the study is equally clear that money alone does not rewrite deep-rooted cultural scripts. The effectiveness of the programmes, the authors find, depends largely on proper implementation, the involvement of communities, the generation of awareness, and socio-cultural factors that no transfer schedule can directly purchase. Where local administrations lacked capacity or coordination, payments were delayed, eligibility was contested, and families disengaged. Where community leaders and women’s groups were actively mobilized, the same financial architecture produced stronger effects on attitudes toward daughters. The lesson is that incentives operate inside a social ecosystem, and the ecosystem frequently matters more than the size of the payment.

The theoretical heart of the paper is a framework that maps the interplay among five elements: policy design, economic incentives, family decisions, cultural attitudes, and social mobilisation. In this model, a scheme’s impact is not a direct function of its budget but the product of a chain of mediating processes. Policy design determines who is eligible and what behavior is rewarded. Economic incentives then interact with household decision-making, where families weigh the promised benefits against the perceived costs of raising daughters, including dowry expectations, inheritance norms, and the cultural premium on sons. Cultural attitudes act as a filter that can amplify or dampen the incentive, while social mobilisation, through panchayats, self-help groups, schools, and media campaigns, can shift the filter itself over time. The framework offers researchers a common vocabulary for comparing schemes across states and countries, and it gives policymakers a diagnostic checklist for identifying where a struggling programme is breaking down.

The comparative dimension of the study yields some of its most instructive insights. Tamil Nadu’s girl child protection schemes, examined in earlier scholarship, combined financial deposits with strong administrative follow-up and achieved notable gains in daughter survival. Delhi’s Ladli scheme, by contrast, was criticized in independent appraisals for complex eligibility rules and weak monitoring that blunted its effect. West Bengal’s Kanyashree programme, which pays girls to stay in school and unmarried until adulthood, has been widely praised for its simplicity and its near-universal uptake among eligible adolescents. Karnataka’s Bhagyalakshmi scheme tied benefits to the birth of girl children in below-poverty-line households. The Haryana scheme sits within this family of interventions, and the study suggests that its performance has been shaped by the same variables: clarity of design, reliability of payments, and the intensity of accompanying awareness campaigns, including the high-profile Beti Bachao Beti Padhao messaging that ran in parallel.

The demographic stakes of this policy family are considerable. Scholars cited in the study trace the phenomenon of Asia’s missing girls to family systems that construct son preference, and note that prenatal sex selection technologies have converted that preference into distorted birth ratios over the past four decades, a pattern documented not only in India but in China, Vietnam, and parts of the Caucasus. The consequences ripple forward into marriage markets, where surplus men face a shortage of brides, and into social stability more broadly. Researchers have also connected the low status of women in son-preference societies to disparities in health, nutrition, and educational investment, meaning that the sex ratio at birth functions as a summary indicator of deeper gender inequities. Any scheme that can genuinely shift that indicator is therefore doing more than redistributing cash; it is intervening in the intergenerational transmission of gender norms.

The study’s reliance on secondary data is both its strength and its limitation, and the authors are transparent about this. Synthesizing government reports and prior evaluations makes it possible to build a comparative and theoretical picture that no single field survey could support, and it avoids the cost and time of primary data collection across multiple states. But it also means the analysis inherits the gaps and biases of the underlying documents, and it cannot capture the lived experience of the families whose decisions the schemes aim to change. The authors note that no new datasets were generated or analysed, positioning the work explicitly as a conceptual contribution rather than an empirical audit. Its value lies in organizing what is known into a framework that future primary research can test and refine.

For policymakers, the paper’s message is a sobering one: there is no shortcut from expenditure to equality. Incentive-based schemes help, but only when they are embedded in honest implementation, sustained community engagement, and public communication that challenges the cultural logic of son preference rather than merely paying families to tolerate daughters. As Indian states continue to experiment with gender-centric transfers, from Maharashtra’s Ladki Bahin Yojana to the evolving national architecture of safety nets, the Haryana case study offers a template for asking the right questions before the next scheme is announced. The daughters the programmes are named after, the study suggests, are best served not by the promise of money alone, but by the patient alignment of design, delivery, and social change.

Subject of Research: Comparative policy analysis of gender-centric girl child welfare schemes and their impact on India's sex ratio at birth

Article Title: Aapki beti hamari beti in focus: a comparative study to conceptualize the impact of gender-centric schemes

Article References: Malik, D., Chhura, B., & Saha, N. (2026). Aapki beti hamari beti in focus: a comparative study to conceptualize the impact of gender-centric schemes. SN Social Sciences, 6(10), Article 498. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01800-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01800-2

Keywords: Aapki Beti Hamari Beti, Haryana, sex ratio at birth, girl child welfare, conditional cash transfers, gender-centric schemes, Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, policy analysis, son preference, India, gender equality, social policy