Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana (MKSP) — India's Women Farmers' Empowerment Programme

Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana (MKSP) has run since 2011 as a sub-component of India's Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM), aiming to strengthen women's participation and productivity in agriculture by organising women farmers into collectives, building technical capacity, and improving access to inputs, credit and markets. It is implemented through State Rural Livelihoods Missions, jointly funded by central and state governments (60:40, with more generous ratios for north-eastern and Himalayan states).

The programme aims to organise women farmers into collectives and improve their technical capacity, access to inputs, credit and markets, so as to raise their agricultural productivity and income.

By 2019, the Ministry of Rural Development reported 84 projects sanctioned across 24 states and 238 of a targeted 273 districts, covering between 3.38 million and 3.6 million women farmers depending on the reporting year and metric used.

A Nielsen study cited across 8 states (Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Assam and one other) found agricultural income 1.3 times higher and livestock income 2.5 times higher in intervention households than in control households, with 59% adoption of agro-ecological practices in treatment villages.

The programme is also a documented cautionary case: independent reporting by India Development Review found only 43% of one project's sanctioned funds had been released by October 2017, and central releases for MKSP fell sharply from Rs 65.60 crore (2018-19) to Rs 11.58 crore (2019-20), Rs 11.20 crore (2020-21) and just Rs 1.85 crore (2021-22) -- a funding collapse linked by independent commentators to stalled expansion, alongside field research noting farm assets and registrations often remain in male relatives' names despite women doing the labour.