Subscribe
The Tamil Nadu government’s recent announcement of the Thaimaman Thanga Mothiram (TTM) (literally translates to Maternal Uncle’s Gold Ring scheme) – a one-gram gold ring to be given to babies born in government hospitals – needs to be evaluated through a gender lens. The scheme also raises the question of what the role of the state in welfare is and what its desirable role should be. The nomenclature and the narrative around the TTM scheme in particular reinforce the image of a patriarchal state that sees itself as protecting and caring for its citizens through its largesse, rather than one that represents people and pledges to carry forward the rights enshrined in the Constitution.
Tamil Nadu is known for its welfare programmes – many of them progressive – setting up strong state institutions that are a model for the rest of the country. It has been a pioneering state in providing entitlements such as school mid-day meals, which over time have expanded to include breakfast, cover children up to class 10, and serve eggs on all days of the week.
The state has led in many other ways – through reforms in the health sector ensuring a more democratised workforce, lower out-of-pocket expenditure in the public sector, and a reasonably well functioning primary healthcare system. Community kitchens, universal Public Distribution System (PDS), strengthened anganwadi centres, better paid frontline workers have all been the trademarks of the welfare state in Tamil Nadu.
The state has also been a frontrunner in providing maternity entitlements. The Dr Muthulakshmi Reddy Maternity Benefit Scheme, in place since 1987, was amended in 2006 to raise the cash assistance to Rs 6,000, years before the country’s first Union maternity scheme, the Indira Gandhi Matritva Sahyog Yojana, was launched in 2010 at just Rs 4,000 (raised to Rs 6,000 only in 2013, to meet the National Food Security Act’s mandated minimum). The Tamil Nadu scheme has always been explicitly framed as compensating pregnant women for wage loss. Over time, the benefit was enhanced to Rs 18,000 (Rs 14,000 in cash and nutrition kits worth Rs 4,000), while the current national scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana, gives only Rs 5,000.
Maternity entitlements are a recognition of women’s time and reproductive work during pregnancy, delivery and exclusive breastfeeding. While women working in the organised sector – which is less than 5% of the female workforce in India – are entitled to paid leave for a period of six months through the Maternity Benefits Act, 1961 (amended in 2017), there is no such provision for women in the unorganised sectors. Considering that most women in India are engaged in unpaid work or informal work with no recognised employers, it has been argued that the only way they can be compensated for this work is through cash transfers. It is therefore also important that these cash transfers are universal, unconditional and the amount is linked to minimum wages.
Feminist groups as well as the right to food movement have for long been demanding maternity entitlements that are equivalent to minimum wages or current wages, whichever is higher. Such entitlements, along with public campaigns highlighting women’s contribution to unpaid domestic and care work, can contribute to not only compensating individual women but also towards recognition and redistribution of unpaid care work in general. The Constitution of India under Directive Principles (Article 42) recognises the State’s obligations towards ‘maternity relief’.
In contrast, schemes such as the TTM are loaded with messaging that reinforces patriarchal norms in various ways. First, it is packaged as a ‘gift’ from the state and not a right or entitlement. The government’s own description of the scheme speaks of commemorating the birth of a child and celebrating ‘the joy and importance of motherhood’. Second, the name itself positions the scheme as a ‘gift’. The state describes the TTM as reviving ‘Thaimaman seer’, the custom of a man giving gifts and/or financial support to his sister’s children, a common practice across Tamil Nadu.
But ‘thaimaman’ also carries another association in the state – that of cross-cousin marriage between a girl and her maternal uncle. Anthropologists have attributed the origins of this practice as being motivated in wanting to keep the property within the family. But, if framed as a maternity right in the form of wage compensation, the scheme could be located firmly within the rights framework. It is reported that each ring costs the state around Rs 17,000, an amount that can be used to enhance the maternity benefits and make it wage-linked.
The timing of the introduction of the scheme is also not incidental, coming at a time when southern states, worried about declining fertility rates, are turning towards pro-natalist policies that incentivise having more children. These pro-natalist policies, like the population control policies of an earlier era, put the burden on women without discussing their choices or the support systems needed for maternity and childcare.
In this context, another recent state policy, namely the extension of maternity leave for a third child, is also relevant. In July 2026, the Madras High Court upheld the policy of restricting maternity leave for government employees to just 12 weeks for a third child, against the 365 days available for the first two. The government’s move, announced in the Assembly on August 18, removes this restriction and brings the third child benefit on par with what is already available for the first two, rather than creating a fresh entitlement tied to family size.
In itself, this correction is welcome. But statements by the Chief Minister and the state Health Minister raising the concern of the state’s total fertility rate falling to 1.3, against the replacement level of 2.1, and the need to encourage families to consider having a third child give away the true preoccupation with population growth rather than recognising maternal rights.
This is the crux of the matter. Policies such as extending maternity leave, or removing the two-child condition for government benefits, are welcome because they are the right of the woman and child, not because they serve the state’s population goals at a given moment. When entitlements are designed around how many children a woman has had, rather than the actual burden of care work, they stop being about rights and become instruments of ‘population management’.
Tamil Nadu has been hailed for better status of women compared to most parts of the country as reflected in the statistics on women’s education, health and employment. In fact, this has often been credited for resulting in higher incomes, productivity and human development in the state.
Yet when one looks at some of the schemes that successive state governments, irrespective of the party in power, have come up with, it becomes clear that the gendered division of labour and patriarchal norms remain deeply entrenched. The earlier Thalikku Thangam Scheme, under which young women were given cash and gold assistance towards a mangalsutra at the time of marriage, and now the TTM come from this same underlying understanding of women – as objects of state benevolence, valued for the roles of wife and mother, rather than as citizens with rights.
If Tamil Nadu wants its gender welfare legacy to mean something more than good indicators, both these announcements are an opportunity to ask the right questions. The issue is not whether the state should support women through pregnancy and childbirth, but whether it is doing so as a matter of right, or as a gift it can choose to give, take away, or make conditional, depending on what the state wants from its women at a given time.
Dipa Sinha is with the Centre for the Study of the Indian Economy, Azim Premji University.
Views expressed are the author’s own.
