How a government scheme turned gender intelligence into assets

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How a government scheme turned gender intelligence into assets

by Anna Roy, Sonal Jaitly and Vaishnavi Harish Mungale
Nov 28, 2025
3 min

The Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana proves that gender-intelligent design can empower girls to transition from financial access to asset ownership. The scheme intervenes early and at scale to reshape how women in India make household decisions and build long-term economic security.

India stands at a pivotal moment in its development journey, with the largest-ever cohort of educated, digitally savvy, and financially aware young women — many single, ambitious, and ready to lead. For the first time, they’re entering the economy with real access to banking and digital tools. But access alone isn’t autonomy. True empowerment begins when financial inclusion evolves into asset ownership, enabling women to shape their futures and achieve financial independence.

This shift from access to ownership is still a work in progress — but the Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana (SSY), launched in 2015, offers valuable lessons in how gender-intelligent design can accelerate asset creation, drive behavioural change, and scale inclusion.

Preventive inclusion pays dividends: Initiating girls’ financial inclusion during childhood helps preempt structural barriers for women and reduces the long-term costs of corrective policy interventions.
Design drives behaviour: Gender-intelligent products can reshape household saving patterns, directing resources towards girls and fostering sustained financial commitment to their futures.
Scalability within existing systems: SSY shows that gender-intelligent design is both feasible and scalable within mainstream institutions, creating opportunities to better serve underserved women.

While most policies for women begin in adulthood, like credit, cash transfers, or pensions, meaningful inclusion requires early lifecycle intervention. Early interventions allow time for accumulation and the magic of compounding to kick in, not just in numbers but also in terms of financial behaviour change.

SSY exemplifies a successful early lifecycle intervention. Accounts are opened for girls aged 0–10, with deposits continuing through adolescence (10–18) and maturing in early adulthood (18–25), aligning with education and marriage milestones. Partial withdrawals at 18 can fund higher education, while balances left beyond 21 continue earning interest. Since its introduction, the returns have consistently exceeded 7.6%, making it an attractive long-term savings option for parents. SSY has grown from 42 lakh accounts and ₹123 crore in deposits in 2014–15 to 3.5 crore accounts and over ₹3 lakh crore in 2024–25 with the national average deposit per account at ₹63,402. To put that in perspective, this corpus rivals the annual budgets of several Indian states.

Regional studies show that SSY has improved education equity and financial security for girls; and, parents’ preparedness for future needs. It changed aspirations from marriage-focused saving to investing in higher education. This behavioural shift mirrors global child-focused financial products like Singapore’s Child Development Account and UK’s Junior ISA. However, SSY is among the few globally to direct financial assets explicitly in the name of girls, correcting a historic gender gap in asset ownership.

The success of SSY also hinges on institutional participation. Post offices and banks have played a pivotal role in scaling the scheme and building trust. This is critical in a country like India, where gaps in women’s financial inclusion and asset ownership are particularly pronounced, underlining the need for banks to deploy and scale more gender intelligent products. Women remain the most unbanked and underbanked segment in India. IFC estimates credit demand among women-owned very small enterprises alone is ₹83,600 crore (approx. $11.4 billion). Demand for savings, investment, insurance, and pension products also remains underserved. SSY has helped post offices and banks attract substantial deposits for the government treasury, while earning commissions and making it a win-win for both financial institutions and women.

Post Offices manage about 68% of all 3.07 crore SSY accounts, thus leveraging their historic trust and large network. This demonstrates that gender-intelligent design can scale through established financial channels, integrating equity-oriented products into mainstream banking without need for parallel structures.

As SSY approaches its tenth anniversary, it presents a pivotal moment to expand its reach in lower participation states and evolve to meet the financial aspirations of today’s families. Enhancing the scheme by raising the investment cap and extending the 15-year deposit window can further strengthen its returns and long-term impact.

SSY is more than a savings scheme, it’s a blueprint for inclusive growth. It shows that policy can shift household behaviour. The next challenge is for financial institutions to sustain this momentum by creating gender-intelligent products that build trust, deliver long-term value, and make inclusion measurable and accountable for girls.

For policymakers, this means embedding gender intelligence into every layer of financial inclusion. For markets, it means women as mainstream economic drivers and designing solutions that truly serve their financial needs.

SSY 2.0 can continue to be a powerful instrument for gender intelligent financial inclusion transforming early savings into lifelong security for millions of girls.

This was first published on Hindustan Times on Nov 28, 2025.