Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PM-GKY): Addressing COVID-19 Vulnerabilities – IMPRI Impact And Policy Research Institute

Policy Update

Shivchaitanya Mahajan

Background

The Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana (PM-GKY) was rolled out on March 26, 2020. It represented the first impulse in India’s emergency relief response package. The PM-GKY was aimed directly at alleviating the socio-economic impact of the pandemic and accompanying lockdown on vulnerable communities, particularly the poorest people. The scheme set out to prevent millions, more than 800 million individuals, from undergoing starvation, retain some level of financial viability, and maintain access to essential commodities (food items) for marginal groups, such as daily wage workers, migrant labourers, and below-poverty line (BPL) populations in the wake of the pandemic. The PM-GKY essentially created a combination of multiple existing welfare programs (Public Distribution System (PDS), and Jan Dhan Yojana) and new ones, and it signaled to everybody a government worthy of claiming the slogan of “No One Left Behind” in this time of crisis. It was implemented in two bursts of activity (Apr.-Jun. 2020 and May–Jun. 2021), with an original provision of ₹1.7 lakh crore (rupees). This program emerged as an essential intervention (albeit a temporary one), just as a nationwide lockdown disrupted many livelihoods, and also threatened food security for millions of Indians. By melding existing welfare structures and introducing multiple responsive interventions, the PM-GKY made every attempt to create a “Ccomprehensive Safety Net” during an unprecedented national crisis. The two-phase implementation of the PM-GKY served to facilitate carefully calibrated responses to the pandemic, as the landscape continued to evolve, while defending claims of extending social vulnerability through Inter-Ministerial Committees (IMC).

Functioning

PM-GKY’s multi-component approach addressed food security, income loss, and healthcare access through a coordinated strategy that targeted multiple dimensions of pandemic-induced vulnerability:

Food Security (PM-GKAY)

The Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana component provided 5 kg of free grains (rice/wheat) per person per month under the National Food Security Act (NFSA), effectively doubling pre-pandemic FLWs for 80 crore beneficiaries of the NFSA. This extensive food security response was implemented through the huge Public Distribution System (PDS) which included additional distribution via mobile vans called “ration vans” in high migrant worker concentrations. The distribution process ranged from food distribution, to technology-supported delivery options such as waiving off biometric identification when migrating workers forming crowds, to ensure there was no interruption to services and maintain social distance; the people were able to get food entitlements from eligible fair price shops using their ration cards, and where possible, states also introduced a token system via SMS or printing a token to prevent crowding at point of distributions.

Direct Cash Transfers

For the first time ever, the program provided a cash transfer of ₹500/month to 20.65 crore women Jan Dhan account holders for three months, which cost the Government of India total expenditure of ₹30,975 crore. While gendered impacts are rarely a priority when designing and implementing social protection programs, the covid-19 pandemic required a rethink of a more gender sensitive policy and practice considering that the household financial managers are women. The scheme also provided for a front-loading of PM-KISAN payments by transferring ₹2,000/farmer to 8.19 crore farmers in order to ensure that agricultural production could continue in a dramatic marketplace disruption. Ex-gratia payments were made to 3 crore senior citizens, widows, and persons with disabilities who are extremely at-risk demographic groups providing ₹1,000 to them as a direct payment. The cash transfer was delivered through the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) mechanism as set up to process financial payments to beneficiaries by means of the JAM (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile) mechanism which worked to minimize leakages while providing timely distributions of financial assistance to the intended beneficiaries.

Employment and Wages

To help sustain rural employment, the program gave a wage increase of ₹20/day under MGNREGA, which benefited 13.62 crore rural households. The objectives aims of the wage increase were to increase purchasing power in rural households while supporting employment during the downturn of the economic slowdown. In addition to this direct wage support, Ujjwala benefited from the delivery of free LPG cylinders of 8.3 crore households that received subsidized cooking fuels to reduce indoor air pollution and relieved the burden of collecting fuel during the lockdown. State governments also supported employment in rural areas by starting special public works projects that ensured some jobs could be done with social distancing.

Healthcare Support

The scheme expanded health insurance coverage of ₹5 lakh/family for inpatient treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic, adding this as a service under Ayushman Bharat-PMJAY. The scheme was designed to ensure that economically vulnerable households had access to quality health care, without incurring catastrophic costs. By expanding on existing health insurance systems, the scheme offered a relatively straightforward implementation pathway through existing collaboration and inter-organizational integrity while offering the same level of protection for COVID-19 related hospitalization and treatment. Various provisions were made for the costs of testing, medication, and hospitalization specifically for COVID-19. Emergency provisions were also made for treatment at empaneled private hospitals when public hospitals became too unitized.

Implementation Challenges

PM-GKY had a broadly well-designed scheme, yet implementation faced challenges. Exclusions of beneficiaries occurred, particularly when the records of beneficiaries on the digitally transformed NFSA lists were out of date. This occurred for temporary migrants, who had migrated across state borders for job opportunities before the lockdown. Delivery times affected the effectiveness of programs, as cash based interventions through DBT faced technical issues related to limited mobility of banking correspondents during levels of lockdown. Food grain leakage in PDS increased to concerning levels of 40% in some states, due to weak monitoring and logistics capacities. These implementation gaps raised the importance of developing dynamic and adaptive databases of beneficiaries, plus strong last mile delivery systems for emergency welfare actions.

Performance

The performance of PM-GKY can be assessed through both quantitative metrics and qualitative outcomes that demonstrate its reach and effectiveness during the pandemic period.

Quantitative Outcomes (2020–2021)

The scheme achieved significant coverage across its various components, reaching millions of vulnerable Indians during the most acute phases of the pandemic:

Graphical Representation of PM-GKY Expenditure

The chart above illustrates the distribution of PM-GKY expenditure across its major components, with food security (PM-GKAY) receiving the largest allocation at 75% of total spending, highlighting the primacy of addressing nutritional needs during the crisis.

Monthly Beneficiary Coverage Trend

The visualisation depicts the monthly coverage of beneficiaries under the two primary components of PM-GKY, showing the consistent reach of food security measures and the gradual expansion of cash transfer recipients over the implementation period.

Qualitative Outcomes

The benefits of PM-GKY transcended beyond just quantitative measures to create meaningful qualitative changes for vulnerable populations. Food Security interventions resulted in significant decreases in hunger demonstrations and protests, with extreme poverty (i.e., <1%) being recorded in 2020 due to food subsidies breaching any potential serious decline in caloric intake during the lockdown periods. The nutritional security offered by PM-GKAY reduced the risk of acute malnutrition which would have likely occurred after the loss of income and shocks from the market limitations. In terms of Income Stabilization, PM-GKY cash transfers prevented an estimated 82 million people from falling into poverty during the pandemic. These cash transfers provided essential liquidity at a time when informal sector incomes fell to zero, enabling households to meet non-food essential expenditure, such as medicines, utilities, and school education materials for children engaging in remote education activities. The cash flows, especially in women’s accounts, increased household resilience which avoided distress sales of power productive assets which would have impaired any possibility of recovery from the pandemic.

Impact

The PM-GKY generated multidimensional impacts across various socioeconomic domains, creating both immediate relief and longer-term resilience for vulnerable populations.

Poverty Alleviation

Poverty Alleviation PM-GKY has played a vital role in India’s significant drop in poverty headcount ratio (HCR), from 27.5% in 2011–12 to less than 1.5% in 2020, primarily from food subsidies and cash transfers alleviating the impacts of income shocks. The 10 kg aides per month provided per person by PM-GKY (which includes the 5 kg NFSA entitlement and the 5kg supplement) equals 68% of a person’s caloric needs and has prevented acute malnutrition from low income situations. It provided a basic nutritional safety net for intergenerational transmission of malnutrition at a critical point in time, during which child development was particularly sensitive to outcomes. Research shows that districts with higher coverage of PM-GKY had statistically significantly lower rates of wasting in children under 5 years of age than areas where PM-GKY was not implemented, which indicates that PM-GKY targeted households that were nutritionally vulnerable.

Gender Inclusion

PM-GKY’s cash transfer component, where only women Jan Dhan account holders were eligible, created a gendered design that emphasized women’s economic inclusion and decision-making control. Research findings reveal that 72% of women recipients improved their household bargaining power after receiving direct cash transfers. The changes to women’s economic empowerment were also post-crisis and many women maintained financial and active accounts after the program ended, marking a systemic change in gendered behavior around financial access and utilization. By recognizing women as recipients of transfers, it also acknowledged their responsibilities as resource managers (especially for benefits like nutritional quality) for the household and for controlling the flow of funds, allowing funding to be spent on family welfare instead of diverted inappropriately to non-essential consumption.

Rural Resilience

Improved MGNREGA wage rates under PM-GKY generated 52% more employment days in rural areas, thus supporting and stabilizing rural demand, especially when reverse migration was increasing pressure on village economies during the lockdowns. The rural employment guarantee functioned as an automatic or implicit stabilizer, expanding in a self-determined way as demand for work increased in the face of economic contraction. The multiplier effect of MGNREGA wages circulating in rural economies provided continued support for markets and enterprises at a time when urban-rural remittances had declined sharply. In addition, many MGNREGA projects were focused on developing water conservation and agricultural infrastructure for community use, hence building long-term climate resilience, along with immediate income support.

Criticisms

In spite of its accomplishments, PM-GKY was heavily critiqued on both implementation and design. Urban Exclusion surfaced as a critical issue as migrant workers simply did not have access to PDS as it related to ration cards based on their location and they could not use it outside their home state. Ironically, those workers who had migrated in search of better economic opportunities, faced significant vulnerabilities during this crisis as their mobility kept them in ‘no man’s land.’ The lack of universal identification systems that worked across state borders further illustrated the limitations of India’s segmented social protection architecture.PM-GKY was also critiqued for being Short-term Focused in that with benefits ending suddenly in June 2021, it failed to recognize the ongoing economic disruptions for vulnerable households right away. The abrupt cutoff in support services did not consider the reality of slower recovery in informal sector jobs as well as the continued disruptions to supply chains keeping inflationary pressures on essential goods prices to high levels well after the last lockdown. The abrupt cutoff at the end of June highlighted the need for more adaptable social protection systems with phase-out plans designed to be based on post-recovery indicators and other trigger indicators rather than arbitrary end dates.

Emerging Issues

The implementation of PM-GKY revealed several systemic challenges in India’s social protection framework that require structural reforms for more effective crisis response in the future.

Implementation Gaps

There were substantial Coverage Errors in this program in the sense that around 30% of the transitory poor, especially informal urban workers, were excluded from benefits on account of eligibility criteria related to permanent resident status. This exclusion presented protection asymmetries whereby established rural poor received full support while urban workers newly made vulnerable had to deal with bureaucratic exclusions to access relief. The lack of unified vulnerability assessment processes meant it was difficult to quickly identify and include newly impoverished households which had fallen below the poverty thresholds due to the pandemic.

The fragmented Data Systems complicated delivery efficacy as fragmented databases across multiple government departments resulted in delays to beneficiary updates and verification processes. The lack of interoperability between state and central databases created identifiable access barriers for migrant workers registered in their state home, thereby limiting their ability to be located and served in their actual context, despite eligibility. Overall, these data integration challenges emphasized the need for shared social registries that would allow for rapid responses in emergencies without any form of paperwork or verification for vulnerable groups.

State-Centre Coordination issues emerged in the context of interstate ration card portability lag. This hampered the ability of migrants to access food security provisions. There were very different capacities and approaches to implementation across the states, leading to different levels of coverage, and while some states successfully used delivery mechanisms already intended for food security, others struggled with last mile delivery and beneficiary identification. How these coordination issues manifested emphasized the importance of delineating responsibilities between the central and state government in a crisis situation, as well as having flexible fund utilization guidelines to account for the states’ local implementation context.

Stakeholder Recommendations

Drawing on the experience with the implementation of PM-GKY, stakeholders have suggested a number of reforms to reinforce preparedness for future crisis responses. One important reform would take advantage of digitizing the NFSA Lists through the integration with Aadhaar and real-time migration data, to create a dynamic database of beneficiaries. This would be an efficient way to maintain records of movements across state lines, showing reputable beneficiaries automatically when they crossed state lines. From a beneficiary perspective, this infrastructure provides a clear advantage, enabling the entitlement to follow the beneficiary whatever their movement is and not be tied to static locations that become irrelevant as a consequence of unpredictable movements of people.A more strategic recommendation considers proposed reforms aimed at universalization of PDS, by adopting the one nation, one ration card policy to support migrant inclusion. This portability policy affords a direct and equitable relationship by shifting food security rights from a place-related status, to a universal entitlement that beneficiaries can access no matter where they are physically located. The infrastructure for the proposed portability model exists to develop accessibility through the use of Aadhaar authenticated systems. The only issue left to pursue primarily involves the political willingness of policy actors and inter-state protocols used to manage co-operation.Drawing on the experience with the implementation of PM-GKY, stakeholders have suggested a number of reforms to reinforce preparedness for future crisis responses.

 One important reform would take advantage of digitizing the NFSA Lists through the integration with Aadhaar and real-time migration data, to create a dynamic database of beneficiaries. This would be an efficient way to maintain records of movements across state lines, showing reputable beneficiaries automatically when they crossed state lines. From a beneficiary perspective, this infrastructure provides a clear advantage, enabling the entitlement to follow the beneficiary whatever their movement is and not be tied to static locations that become irrelevant as a consequence of unpredictable movements of people.

A more strategic recommendation considers proposed reforms aimed at universalization of PDS, by adopting the one nation, one ration card policy to support migrant inclusion. This portability policy affords a direct and equitable relationship by shifting food security rights from a place-related status, to a universal entitlement that beneficiaries can access no matter where they are physically located. The infrastructure for the proposed portability model exists to develop accessibility through the use of Aadhaar authenticated systems. The only issue left to pursue primarily involves the political willingness of policy actors and inter-state protocols used to manage co-operation.

Way Forward

The PM-GKY experience highlighted the need for adaptive social protection frameworks that can scale rapidly during crises while maintaining targeting precision. Its implementation success offers three foundational lessons for future social policy development in India.

Targeted Delivery

By building on the JAM Trinity (Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile), we can strengthen the development effectiveness of complete DBT systems by narrowing the delivery gap, reducing leakages and delays. Future social protection programs should adopt a dynamic beneficiary identification approach using vulnerability indicators in real-time, rather than static poverty lists – so when economic shocks occur, newly vulnerable households (including their members) are included automatically. Improved technology-enabled delivery instruments using mobile banking, biometric authentication (offline), and geospatial targeting can enhance the program effectiveness and accuracy of identifying households who are left behind. Investing in last-mile banking infrastructure to enhance correspondent banking services in remote areas could help alleviate bottlenecks created by existing cash transfer systems.

Urban Social Security

There were significant gaps in urban social protection arrangements and the pandemic highlighted these gaps indicating the need to address the issue through portable schemes that are designed to support migrant labour in urban situations. Some cities introduced city-level schemes to mitigate impacts, such as rental subsidies for urban workers, fast-tracking transport subsidies in a state of emergency, and an urban employment guarantee along the lines of MGNREGA to offer comprehensive protection for informal workers in urban spaces. If local-level governments and local city regions are going to design effective social protection schemes, they require more power and funding to introduce welfare schemes that are locally relevant, to address urban poverty that is fundamentally different from rural deprivation. Recognizing urban informal settlements specifically for the purposes of service delivery would enable better targeting of the most vulnerable urban populations in the event of future crises, while still withholding property rights.

Financial Resilience

Extending insurance coverage through mechanisms like PM-SYM (Pradhan Mantri Shram Yogi Maandhan) could allow households to hedge against income shock (other than cash transfers). Microinsurance products that are made for informal sector workers could offer some protection against income disruption, as well as allow avenues for financial inclusion. Implementing financial literacy programs with cash transfer delivery could allow the longer-term impacts of emergency aid to create household financial management capacity which would be sustainable. Furthermore, creating formal credit access for vulnerable populations using innovative products to provide consumption smoothing loans with counter cyclical repayment terms could reduce dependence on predatory informal lending in times of crises. Institutionalize the best practices of PM-GKY, and India can achieve its vision of “Antyodaya” (upliftment of the last person) by stopping the multi-dimensional chronic aspects of poverty and allow equitable growth. Converting emergency pandemic responses as a leveled up systematic social protection architecture will mark a huge shift in India’s welfare paradigm, allowing resilience in future shocks and addressing multi-dimensional vulnerabilities. The comprehensive social protection architecture would provide alignment to India’s constitutional commitment, espousing social justice while encouraging economic development through sustaining protection of human capital during crisis periods.

References

[1] Varshney, D., Kumar, A., Mishra, A. K., Rashid, S., & Joshi, P. K. (2020). Could Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana (PM-GKY) mitigate COVID-19 shocks in the agricultural sector: Evidence from Northern India. IFPRI Discussion Paper 1990. https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.134222

[2] Government of India. (2024). Expenditure Budget 2025-2026. https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/doc/eb/allsbe.pdf

[3] Climate Policy Initiative. (2025). Sustainable Finance Flows to India’s Agriculture Sector. https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Sustainable-Agriculture-Finance-in-India.pdf

[4] Government of India. (2025). Economic Survey 2024-25. https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/economicsurvey/doc/echapter.pdf

[5] Jain, A., Tripathi, S., Chaudhary, K. K., Bhatti, S., Sharma, S., Gangopadhyay, S., & Van De Klundert, L. (2023). Transition to cooking with clean fuels in rural households of India: Insights from the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana. Journal of Environmental Management, 326, 116827. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.116827

[6] Bharali, I., Kumar, P., & Selvaraj, S. (2020). How well is India responding to COVID-19? Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-well-is-india-responding-to-covid-19/

[7] Ministry of Rural Development. (2022). Programmes on Garib Kalyan Rojgar Abhiyan. https://rural.gov.in/en/press-release/programmes-garib-kalyan-rojgar-abhiyan

[9] UN Women. (2024). India Report Beijing+30. https://www.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/2024-09/b30_report_india_en.pdf

[10] EY. (2025). Landmarks in India’s economic reforms: 2015 to 2025. https://www.ey.com/content/dam/ey-unified-site/ey-com/en-in/insights/tax/economy-watch/documents/2025/03/ey-e-volume-land-marks-in-india-s-economic-reforms-2015-to-2025.pdf

About the Contributor
Shivchaitanya Mahajan, affiliated with Symbiosis School of Economics, is a researcher at IMPRI specializing in social policy analysis.

Acknowledgment
The contributor gratefully acknowledges the guidance and support provided by Team IMPRI throughout the course of this work.

Disclaimer: All views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and not necessarily to the organisation.

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