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

Mahila Kisan Sashaktikaran Pariyojana (MKSP), running since 2011 as a sub-component of India's Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM), aims to strengthen women's participation and productivity in agriculture by organising women farmers into collectives, building their technical capacity, and improving access to inputs, credit and markets. It is implemented through State Rural Livelihoods Missions, jointly funded by the central and state governments (60:40, with more generous ratios for north-eastern and Himalayan states).
By 2019, the Ministry of Rural Development reported 84 projects sanctioned across 24 states and 238 of a targeted 273 districts, with figures ranging from 33.81 lakh (3.38 million) targeted to 36.06 lakh (3.6 million) women farmers reported as covered, 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 that independent commentators link to stalled expansion, alongside field research noting that farm assets and registrations often remain in male relatives' names despite women doing the labour.

Read the full analysis: https://mksp.nrlm.gov.in/portal/