Bridge gender, tech divide to boost Gruha Lakshmi’s impact

One of the five guarantees of the Congress government in Karnataka, Gruha Lakshmi Yojane is a basic income scheme for women’s financial empowerment.

It delivers Rs 2,000 per month to approximately 1.22 crore poor women, who are heads of households. It sidesteps the drips and dribbles of delivery losses by crediting the amount directly into beneficiary bank accounts.

A technology-driven model—Seva Sindhu portal-based enrolment, Aadhaar-linked bank-account-based delivery, and mobile SMS-based credit intimation—enables this.

While the cover story has a neat narrative, conversations with women recipients for the Karnataka-wide impact assessment of the Five Guarantees, by Indus Action and Lokniti-CSDS, reveal layered experiences.

Vijayalakshmi of Shiroli, Bagalkote, who is in her forties, works as casual farm labour and falls below the poverty line. “I can’t read the message from the bank. I ask someone to read it to see if the money has come.”

Her voice is echoed by several others in her Other Backward Caste locality. They depend on their husbands, children, and even grandchildren to parse the English message. In fact, for many the SMS arrives on the husband’s phone, and they hear of it only when he mentions it. 

While beneficiaries have linked cell phones, women seldom own that device. Rural or urban, the phone number of the male head of the household is provided to the bank, government, school, etc., even when the woman owns a phone. She has to ask for access to her husband’s phone to check the message and for assistance. While some have trained themselves to look for the ‘Rs 2000’ phrase, most find it an ordeal to navigate phone messages.

Telecom data from the 2025 NSS Comprehensive Modular Survey corroborates this. Only 59% of rural and 79% of urban women over 15 years of age own a personal mobile, with a marked gender gap of 23-26%. Smartphone ownership is lower; about 30-40% of women do not have access at will to a device to develop operational comfort.

Withdrawal of cash is not always at their discretion either. For example, Eramma in Tiptur, beneficiary in her thirties, must rely on her husband or brother for transport to the bank to withdraw money. Yashodhamma, from Lingarajapuram, shares an auto with other women to the post office. Women prefer bank branches and post offices where the staff speak Kannada, to an ATM’s alien interface and undecipherable prompts.

Cash is queen for many of these women as they hardly use mobile payments -- restricted by their feature phones and daunted by payment apps. Aphorising one conversation, PINs give them pins and needles! Telecom data too reinforces this: 50-66% of women rely solely on cash, not the phone, for financial transactions.

When Gruha Lakshmi misses a monthly deposit, senior citizens Kashibai and Gangamma of Ravoor in Kalaburgi, approach the local Anganwadi worker as their port of call. She is the most accessible and familiar face of the Women and Child Welfare Department. Across the state, women approach Panchayat offices or ask their self help groups, seeking a person over a helpline or portal.

Even the initial enrolment in the scheme poses technological barriers for women. Many women rely on an accompanying male to interpret the application paperwork and directions of the staff at Grama One, Bangalore One, or other such centres. They find it unintuitive to glean the requisite details from their ration or Aadhaar card, their role in family and society having circumscribed their exposure to civic processes. Note that district-level National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5) captures that 50% of women in Karnataka have less than 10 years of formal schooling.

One of the lessons from the study is that Gruha Lakshmi exposes the digital divide along gender lines. Many beneficiaries depend on male intervention to access their own basic income. 

It might be tempting to imagine that as wireless penetration soars, this problem will resolve itself. On the contrary, as life expectancy improves, the number of seniors and older women will increase. Since that demographic is already under-exposed to technology, their ability to keep pace with innovations is imperilled. When they are behind yesterday’s smartphones, SMSes, and ATMs, how can they match the speed of artifical intelligence?

This quandary is blowback from pernicious cultural and social norms that deprive women of civic and economic latitude. If Gruha Lakshmi is to achieve its stated intent of bolstering women’s financial self-sufficiency, deliberately facilitating their financial and technological literacy is essential. Local infrastructure like Koosina Mane, Arivu Kendra, and Anganwadi, and resources like self-help groups, could redouble as knowledge hubs, with women teaching women.

It is time critical to bridge this widening gap. Women are already behind a technological curve whose headlong evolutionary tempo leaves even avant garde users breathless. If women’s financial and technological literacy becomes a State priority, the sizeable female population that is more equipped and engaging of market forces can boost Karnataka’s economic vitality.

(The writer leads the Karnataka-wide five guarantees impact assessment
project as senior advisor at Lokniti/CSDS)