Panel Paper: Can Conditional Cash Transfers Improve Maternal and Child Health? Evidence from a Conditional Maternity Benefit Program in India

Tuesday, July 30, 2019
40.041 - Level 0 (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Raghav Puri, Syracuse University


With conditional cash transfers becoming an important health policy intervention in developing countries, evidence of their impact on maternal and child health is crucial for gauging their effectiveness. This is particularly true for India which accounts for a significant share of global maternal and infant deaths. This poster will present the first estimates of the impact of India’s conditional maternity benefit program – the Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahyog Yojana (IGMSY, or the Indira Gandhi Motherhood Support Program) – on maternal and child health outcomes.

The IGMSY is a conditional maternity benefit program that provides a cash benefit to pregnant women for their first two live births. The cash benefit is provided in three installments conditional on meeting a set of criteria (such as registration of pregnancy and birth, antenatal checkups and complete immunization of the child). By encouraging these positive behaviors, the conditional maternity benefit program aims to improve maternal and child health outcomes in India.

This paper uses the phased roll out of the program (it was initially implemented in 52 of India’s 640 districts in 2011 and scaled up to all districts in 2017) and recently released data from the National Family Health Survey (2015-16) to estimate the impact of conditional maternity benefits on maternal and child health outcomes in India. After matching treatment districts with control districts, a difference-in-differences estimator is used to calculate the effects of the program.

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