A Study of Public Belief in Maternity Benefit Provisions in PMMVY among Pregnant Women & Lactating Mothers in Haryana

Abstract

The most productive years of a woman’s life and her reproductive years are in the same period. Pregnancy causes different physiological and anatomical alterations in a woman’s body that help in adaptations to allow the growth of the foetus. These changes demand nutritious food, adequate rest, and timely health checkups in the prenatal and post-natal period. A working woman has to take a break from her job to have proper rest before and after childbirth. Money is required to meet the expenses incurred in purchasing nutritious food, visiting gynaecologists for health checkups, and institutional delivery. To meet these compulsions, paid maternity leaves have been legislated for female workers in organized sectors in several countries. However, such provisions are not available for female workers in unorganized sectors. The governments of different countries are implementing innovative conditional maternity benefit schemes and the current study is focussed on checking the awareness of India’s Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana (PMMVY) among the potential beneficiaries in Haryana state. The study involves different statistical tests such as descriptive statistics, item analysis (using commonalities, Cronbach’s Alpha if item deleted, item-total correlation, and inter-item correlation), factor analysis (using Kaiser Meyer Olkin (KMO), Bartlett’s test statistics), factor extraction, and hypothesis testing related to differences in awareness using IBM SPSS Statistics v29.0 software. The study is useful for potential beneficiaries and policymakers to make PMMVY a better maternity benefit scheme in terms of implementation and utilization.