The model of conditional cash incentives for protecting the girl child has not fared very well in India.
Over the years, there have been many initiatives across India to promote the girl child and improve its poor child sex ratio. The schemes have differed in name, but converged in their general inefficiency. Now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has launched another such scheme, grandly called the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao Yojana, in the hope of breaking that trend. But will it?
India’s child sex ratio has fallen abysmally since 1991. Back then there were 945 girls for every 1,000 boys. In 2011, there were a mere 918. To address this problem, the new Bharatiya Janata Party-led government announced the BBBP scheme in its first budget presentation in July last year, with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley allocating Rs 100 crore towards the initiative.
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