Kanyashree Prakalpa — West Bengal's Conditional Cash Transfer to Delay Child Marriage (Contested Evidence)

Kanyashree Prakalpa (KP) is a conditional cash transfer run by the Government of West Bengal to keep girls from disadvantaged families in education and to defer marriage until at least age 18. The Pratichi Institute worked on an assessment with UNICEF from December 2015 and delivered a final draft report in October 2017.
Dey and Ghosal (University of Warwick, 2021) use National Family Health Survey data with difference-in-differences and triple-difference methods, comparing a younger cohort exposed to the scheme with an older unexposed cohort and using neighbouring Jharkhand as a comparison state. They estimate that KP reduced the probability of child marriage by 6.7% and raised the probability of secondary or higher education by 6%; the abstract does not state whether these are percent or percentage points.
The evidence is not settled. An unreviewed doctoral essay using NFHS-5 (2019-21) data reports that the programme increased the likelihood of marriage by 4-6 percentage points among girls aged 16-17. Scheme payment amounts and the 2017 assessment's quantitative results were not verified for this entry.
Treat KP as a promising but contested design: useful for replication planning, with monitoring needed to check for age-specific adverse effects.

Read the full analysis: https://econpapers.repec.org/paper/wrkwarwec/1333.htm