Between the Name and the Money: Awareness, Enrolment and Payment under the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana, 2021–2025

Abstract

India has a large maternity benefit scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY), which pays a first-time mother ₹5,000 in cash. The usual explanation for why such schemes under-deliver is that women do not know about them. This paper asks how far that explanation holds for PMMVY between 2021 and 2025. It does two things. First, it reads the small body of recent awareness studies. Second, it works through the statewise enrolment and payment tables that the Ministry of Women and Child Development gave to Parliament in 2024 and 2025. No new survey was done; everything comes from published sources. The awareness studies, mostly small and local, agree that knowledge of the scheme is thin, especially in rural areas, and that women hear about it mainly from anganwadi workers. The official tables show something the awareness literature cannot: the system is unstable even for women who do enrol. Payments to enrolled women fell to 46 per cent of enrolments in 2023–24 and then jumped to 165 per cent in 2024–25, while enrolment itself fell by about a fifth between 2022–23 and 2024–25. Lack of awareness is real, but it is only one leak among several. The paper closes with what this means for anyone trying to design a better way for women to find and follow their entitlements.