From DBT to the Ballot Box: Mukhyamantri Mahila Rozgar Yojana, Women Voters and Electoral Behaviour in the 2025 Bihar Assembly Election

Abstract

Purpose. This paper examines whether the Mukhyamantri Mahila Rozgar Yojana (MMRY)—a gender-targeted Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) scheme implemented in Bihar immediately before the 2025 Legislative Assembly election—can be understood as a meaningful component of the welfare–electoral relationship linking cash transfers, women's political participation and incumbent electoral performance [1].
Design/methodology/approach. The study adopts a mixed-method, explanatory design based primarily on secondary aggregate data drawn from the Election Commission of India (ECI), Government of Bihar releases, official DBT portals, and the peer-reviewed and institutional literature on welfare voting, clientelism and gendered political participation [1]. It develops a DBT–Visibility–Attribution–Participation–Preference (DVAPP) framework and articulates five hypotheses, testing their descriptive rather than causal plausibility.
Findings. MMRY constituted a large-scale, temporally proximate, gender-targeted DBT intervention: the government reported transferring Rs. 7,500 crore to 75 lakh women on 26 September 2025, rising to Rs. 15,600 crore for 1.56 crore women by 28 November 2025 [1]. Female turnout reached approximately 71.60% in 2025 against 62.80% for men, with the NDA winning 202 of 243 seats [1]. These patterns are temporally and descriptively consistent with the hypothesised mechanisms but do not establish that MMRY caused any individual woman's vote.
Research limitations/implications. Granular constituency-level MMRY beneficiary data sufficient for causal inference are unavailable [1]. The design is exposed to the ecological fallacy, confounding, post-treatment bias, granularity limits and timing ambiguity.
Practical implications. Rule-based DBT may permit political credit-claiming without conventional brokered clientelism, with implications for welfare design, monitoring and the institutional independence of welfare from electoral cycles.
Originality/value. The paper offers a transparent, theory-anchored framework and a credible future research design for studying gender-targeted DBT and electoral behaviour, while explicitly refusing an unwarranted causal claim.