PM Modi said today that the practice of ‘cut money’ has ended in West Bengal, citing the direct transfer of the Annapurna Yojana’s fourth instalment to the bank accounts of nearly 1.5 crore women beneficiaries.
What makes this claim different from a typical political assertion is its structure: it isn’t ‘welfare delivery has improved,’ which is hard to verify, it’s ‘money moved directly into X million specific bank accounts,’ which is a mechanism that leaves a traceable, auditable record.
Direct Benefit Transfer claims are checkable in a way that older cash-and-intermediary systems never were — every transfer has a timestamp, an account number and an amount, which is precisely what made ‘cut money’ possible to allege in the first place and precisely what makes its absence possible to demonstrate now.
That’s the underlying logic of DBT as a governance tool: it doesn’t just reduce the opportunity for diversion, it also converts a political claim about corruption into a claim that can, in principle, be verified against transaction records rather than taken on faith.
The broader lesson applies well beyond this specific scheme: when evaluating any claim about reduced corruption or improved delivery, the more specific and mechanism-based the claim (‘X went directly to Y accounts’), the easier it is to actually check — and the more scrutiny it can survive.
The Indian government has expanded DBT infrastructure significantly over the past decade, covering hundreds of welfare schemes across states.
Aadhaar-linked bank accounts have played a central role in enabling direct transfers, reducing leakage compared to earlier cash or voucher-based systems.
West Bengal has multiple state-run welfare schemes targeting women beneficiaries, with Annapurna Yojana forming one component of this broader support system.
The claim regarding the end of ‘cut money’ practices is likely to feature prominently in ongoing political discourse ahead of the state’s assembly elections.
Women at a public information campaign, Paschim Medinipur, West Bengal (representative image), Wikimedia Commons, GODL-India