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Last Updated on February 23, 2025
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The Shakti scheme – Free Bus Rides to every woman gets a lot of flak from everyone, including women. This is primarily because of the question – why should women who can pay for their travel be allowed to use this scheme? Let’s try to understand it.
Budget allocation:
Rs 5,015 crore has been allocated towards the Shakthi Scheme, which provides free bus travel to women.
Of all the 5 guarantees, this guarantee is the cheapest one for the government. More importantly, if they start charging for the women who can pay for themselves, I don’t think the government is going to save a lot from it. Maybe, they do? who knows?
I don’t have all the numbers at hand. The government could have simply made the bus fare free for only those who are BPL card holders and are already receiving 2000 Rs under Gruha Lakshmi scheme. But they didn’t. If they did, I don’t know how much they would have saved.
If they did do that, would it be enough that we didn’t need to have a 15% hike in bus fares? We will never know. I guess the government would have made this calculation and come to a conclusion that the amount they would have collected from women who are not BPL cardholders is not nearly as much as the amount they will raise with the 15% hike in bus fares.
If they collected very little from women with no BPL cards, it would make sense to have this hike that would be effectively paid only by men. This leads to a question – Does every man who pays for the 15% hiked bus fare bitterly think that they are paying for women’s bus fare as well?
They might, but they might also think they are paying for their mothers or wives or sisters or daughters.
Some men do fall for this idea, which could only be a perception or a reality as well, that women’s travel is subsidized by men’s travel. This is true to an extent. This also depends on how much is collected by men travel.
Either way, congress doesn’t want to lose its hold on women’s voter base. There was more than a 10 percentage point difference between women who voted BJP versus Congress in the Karnataka Assembly Election 2023. So, Congress wants to consolidate women voters as much as they can.
Along with the Shakti scheme, we also have Gruha Lakshmi for women. Of course, this is not for every woman, but only for those who hold BPL cards. This also tells you that Congress heavily focused on women during the campaign for the Karnataka assembly election.
Gruha Lakshmi is the most expensive guarantee of all the five.
Rs 28,608 crore has been allocated towards the Gruha Lakshmi scheme, 63% more than the budget estimates for 2023-24.
It has blown up by 63% percent just in one year. Sidddaramiah realized that Gruha Lakshmi was a major burden on the government’s exchequer. He decided he had to cut the waste and reduce the allocation towards this scheme.
So, he went down heavily on those who have BPL cards but are not “Below Poverty Line”. In other words, he canceled the cards of those people who were not really poor. Actually, it was not so much a cancellation as converting them into Above Poverty Line(APL) cards.
“In Karnataka, which is second most tax revenue generating state after Maharashtra, there cannot be 75 to 80 per cent BPL card holders. So we have to cancel them,” Muniyappa said.
Official sources said the Karnataka government has identified 22.63 lakh ineligible BPL card holders in the state as it decided to revise the list.
If the government saves, on average, 2000 Rs for every BPL card in the Gruha Lakshmi scheme, that would be 22.63 lakh X 2000 Rs, which is 452.6 crore rupees every month. So, 452 crores X 12 months, 5424 crores saved every year.
Just like in Shakti scheme-free bus ride for women, the government has taken a cautious approach not to alienate any women voters. They didn’t cancel the ration cards of those whose BPL cards have been upgraded to APL. So, they can still collect food grains and other essential items from ration shops. Therefore, their food security remains unharmed.
The chief minister ordered that if the ration cards of any family other than government employees and income tax payers are cancelled, they should be returned immediately, the Chief Minister’s Office said in a statement.
