Key women-focused schemes

Story hook

It is 22 January 2015. PM Narendra Modi is in Panipat, Haryana — the state with India's worst child sex ratio (834:1000 at the time, Census 2011). He launches Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP) with ₹100 crore initial outlay targeting 100 districts with adverse sex ratio. Behind him stands a girl with a placard: "Beti hai anmol, kyon karte ho mol tol?" ("A daughter is priceless, why do you bargain?").

That image goes viral. Within 24 months, the slogan is on every gas cylinder, every Anganwadi, every CBSE textbook. Critics decry 78% of BBBP budget going to media rather than girl-child welfare. Defenders point to child sex ratio recovery from 918 (NFHS-4, 2015-16) to 929 (NFHS-5, 2019-21) in BBBP districts.

Layer in PM Ujjwala Yojana (1 May 2016 — 10 crore LPG connections to BPL women by 2024), Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana (22 Jan 2015 — 3.86 crore accounts, ₹1.4 lakh crore deposits), **Stand-Up India (5 April 2016 — ₹40,000+ crore loans to women

• SC/ST entrepreneurs)**, and you have the largest women- focused welfare architecture any democracy has launched in a single decade.

For GS-II, "women schemes" is the most-asked, most-cited chunk of Social Justice — central to BBBP-Ujjwala-Sukanya "trinity" trotted out in every Mains 250-word essay on women's empowerment.

Why this matters for UPSC

12 of the last 30 GS-II questions have referenced women's schemes directly: 2017 (BBBP impact), 2019 (PMUY + women's empowerment), 2021 (Mission Shakti), 2024 (PMUY 2.0 + LPG dependency).

Prelims: scheme name → ministry → launch year → outlay → coverage is a frequent matching pair template.