Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday (August 15) set a target of creating 6 crore ‘Lakhpati Didis‘, saying the economic empowerment of rural women can bring a major transformation to India’s rural economy.
Addressing the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort on India’s 80th Independence Day, PM Modi said the government had already surpassed its earlier target of creating 3 crore Lakhpati Didis.
“We have surpassed the target we had set of making three crore sisters ‘Lakhpati Didis’. Now, we are moving forward with the target of creating six crore Lakhpati Didis,” PM Modi said.
According to the Ministry of Rural Development, more than 3.46 crore Self-Help Group (SHG) members had been enabled as Lakhpati Didis by July 2026. The ministry said the figure represented the progress of the Lakhpati Didi initiative under the Deendayal Antyodaya Yojana-National Rural Livelihoods Mission (DAY-NRLM).
But behind the 3.46-crore number is a more granular economic story: where are these women becoming Lakhpati Didis, and what are they actually doing to cross the ₹1 lakh income threshold?
What makes a Lakhpati Didi?
The Lakhpati Didi initiative operates through DAY-NRLM, the government’s flagship rural livelihoods programme.
A Lakhpati Didi is an SHG woman whose annual household income reaches at least ₹1 lakh on a sustainable basis. The government framework requires the income to be sustained for at least four agricultural seasons and/or business cycles, with an average monthly income of at least ₹10,000 as part of the assessment.
The objective is to help rural women build stable and diversified livelihoods through agriculture and allied activities, livestock, food processing, handicrafts, retail, services and other enterprises.
DAY-NRLM provides the institutional base through Self-Help Groups, with support for financial inclusion, skills, livelihood planning, access to credit, enterprise development and market linkages.
Where are the Lakhpati Didis?
The latest national figure is available for 2026, but the government has not yet published a comparable State/UT-wise breakup corresponding to the 3.46-crore figure.
The latest detailed State/UT-wise data available from the Ministry of Rural Development is as of March 31, 2026, provided in the ministry’s reply in Loksabha. At 49.66 lakh, Maharashtra had the largest number followed by Bihar at 43.40 lakh and West Bengal at 34.20 lakh. Uttar Pradesh had 33.52 lakh, rounding out the top four.
| Rank | State / Union Territory | Number of Lakhpati Didis (as of 31.03.2026) |
| 1 | Maharashtra | 49,66,617 |
| 2 | Bihar | 43,40,227 |
| 3 | West Bengal | 34,20,962 |
| 4 | Uttar Pradesh | 33,52,157 |
| 5 | Odisha | 26,74,261 |
| 6 | Madhya Pradesh | 23,67,520 |
| 7 | Andhra Pradesh | 22,73,869 |
| 8 | Telangana | 17,31,262 |
| 9 | Rajasthan | 15,21,620 |
| 10 | Gujarat | 11,31,865 |
| 11 | Chhattisgarh | 10,95,729 |
| 12 | Tamil Nadu | 9,55,015 |
| 13 | Assam | 9,19,762 |
| 14 | Kerala | 7,74,592 |
| 15 | Jharkhand | 7,38,822 |
| 16 | Karnataka | 7,17,755 |
| 17 | Punjab | 3,85,666 |
| 18 | Uttarakhand | 2,84,934 |
| 19 | Jammu & Kashmir | 2,52,867 |
| 20 | Haryana | 2,27,433 |
| 21 | Tripura | 1,63,126 |
| 22 | Himachal Pradesh | 1,45,773 |
| 23 | Meghalaya | 78,946 |
| 24 | Mizoram | 31,747 |
| 25 | Manipur | 24,145 |
| 26 | Nagaland | 19,661 |
| 27 | Arunachal Pradesh | 15,674 |
| 28 | Sikkim | 15,253 |
| 29 | Puducherry | 13,318 |
| 30 | Goa | 4,778 |
| 31 | Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu | 3,172 |
| 32 | Andaman & Nicobar Islands | 674 |
| 33 | Ladakh | 246 |
| 34 | Lakshadweep | 0 |
| — | Total | 3,46,49,448 |
Source for Table: Ministry of Rural Development, reply to Lok Sabha Starred Question No. 123, as on March 31, 2026.
The newer 3.46-crore figure is a national-level number from the Ministry of Rural Development.
What are Lakhpati Didis actually doing?
There is no particular occupation linked to the Lakhpati Didi number. Government case studies show women reaching the income threshold through goat rearing, poultry, dairy farming, agriculture, food processing, handicrafts, weaving, retail, beauty services, banking-related work and other rural enterprises.
The common thread is diversification. A woman rarely arrives at ₹1 lakh through one activity alone — she starts with what’s available, and each modest success buys her the collateral, confidence or capital to add the next layer. Three women, in three very different parts of the country, trace that same arc from different starting points.
Bihar: Livestock into poultry
Reeta Devi, from Bhojpur, is where that progression starts at its most elemental. She joined an SHG in 2015 and invested ₹5,000 into four goats — the entire operation, at that point, fit in a backyard.
The goats generated enough surplus for her to buy 50 hens, and egg sales followed. What began as livestock had, by stages, turned into poultry. She has since expanded that operation into her own poultry farm. The PIB account of her journey, drawn from PM Modi’s interaction with beneficiaries of Bihar’s Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana, credits her with both Lakhpati Didi and Drone Didi status.
It’s a small operation by any conventional business standard, but the sequence — goats, then hens, then a farm — is the diversification model in its purest form: each step funded by the one before it, no external capital beyond the initial ₹5,000.
Jammu & Kashmir: One steady stream, not several
Rabia Bashir, in Kupwara, took a different route: instead of layering activities, she went deep on one. She runs a dairy operation with 10 animals. During an August 2024 interaction with Lakhpati Didis in Jalgaon, Maharashtra, she told PM Modi that she earns ₹1.20 lakh annually through her business — comfortably past the threshold, and importantly, month on month rather than tied to a single harvest.
Dairy’s advantage over crop-dependent livelihoods is exactly that regularity, and Bashir has since put the model to use beyond her own household: she told PM Modi she had helped 160 other SHG members reach Lakhpati status themselves, turning an individual income stream into something closer to a local template.
Meghalaya: From produce to product
Badashisha Dkhar, in East Jaintia Hills, represents the third variant — value addition rather than volume or steadiness. After SHG-linked food-processing training, she secured a ₹2.5 lakh bank-linkage loan in 2024 and combined it with her own savings to set up a juice-processing micro-enterprise, converting what would otherwise have been sold as raw produce into a packaged product.
The account, published by the Ministry of Rural Development through PIB based on a Meghalaya State Rural Livelihoods Society success story, credits the enterprise with employing three people and generating annual income of around ₹1.8 lakh. Her products were showcased at the Pineapple Festival at Delhi Haat in 2024 — a step beyond local sale, into market access that a raw-produce business wouldn’t have had on its own.
Between them, Devi, Bashir and Dkhar cover the three basic levers behind the Lakhpati Didi number: compounding one activity into another, converting an unstable income into a stable one, and adding value to what was already being produced. None of the three followed a template — DAY-NRLM’s role in each case was less to prescribe a business than to supply the credit, training or market link at the point each woman needed it.
The government’s own examples show the model extending well beyond these three. At the “Samriddh Didi se Samriddh Rashtra | Republic Day Felicitation Ceremony, 2026”, organised by the Ministry of Rural Development in New Delhi on January 25, Lakhpati Didis shared experiences across food processing, printing, beauty services, banking, agriculture, livestock, weaving, retail and JCB operations, according to the ministry.
In Maharashtra, the PIB transcript of PM Modi’s August 2024 interaction with Lakhpati Didis recorded women involved in handmade beauty products, sanitary napkin production, banking services, Mahua-related businesses, tourism and e-rickshaw operations.
One woman involved in handmade and homemade beauty products said her SHG’s turnover had crossed ₹30 lakh, with net profit of more than ₹12 lakh. Another described a sanitary napkin enterprise run by 10 women with a turnover of ₹5 lakh. A Bank Sakhi participating in the interaction said she earned ₹4.5-5 lakh while helping rural women access banking services.
Taken together, these examples point to a broader shift: the rural women’s enterprise economy is increasingly moving beyond farm-based livelihoods.
The next push is towards non-farm businesses
The government is explicitly trying to expand this non-farm component. At the two-day Rashtriya Gramin Vikas Sammelan organised by the Ministry of Rural Development in Delhi on June 28-29, 2026, Union Rural Development Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan said rural women need to move beyond traditional activities towards food processing, agri-business, services and digital platforms.
The Start-up Village Entrepreneurship Programme (SVEP), which operates under DAY-NRLM, is part of that effort. According to the Ministry of Rural Development, the programme had supported 4.32 lakh enterprises by June 2026.
The government is also trying to solve another problem: how do these women find customers? Its market-access initiatives include the Saras and Aajeevika brands, Saras Melas and the eSaras platform, along with partnerships with online marketplaces and government procurement platforms.
Becoming a Lakhpati Didi is only the first step. Maintaining ₹1 lakh or more in household income requires sustained demand for whatever a woman produces or sells.
The real test: Sustainability
A woman cannot simply cross ₹1 lakh for one year and remain a Lakhpati Didi. The income has to be sustained across multiple agricultural seasons or business cycles. That makes productivity, market access and diversification critical.
The government’s own evaluations indicate that DAY-NRLM has had a measurable impact on household incomes. A 2025 evaluation of the programme, covering around 23,000 households across nine states, found that household incomes increased by 9.5% in NRLM blocks, while income gains in mature community-institution clusters ranged from 12% to 33%, according to the Ministry of Rural Development.
From 3 crore to 6 crore
PM Modi’s new target therefore represents more than a numerical expansion of a government scheme. The existing DAY-NRLM network already covers a vast part of rural India. The challenge now is to convert that network into a larger ecosystem of women-led enterprises and sustainable household incomes.
Devi, Bashir and Dkhar are three data points inside a 3.46-crore figure, but the range between them — a backyard poultry operation, a ten-animal dairy herd, a juice-processing unit employing three people — is really the point. There is no single Lakhpati Didi story, only variations on the same climb toward the same threshold, from wherever a woman happened to start.
PM Modi also used his Independence Day address to point to women’s growing presence in sectors such as aviation, defence, sports and STEM, including tribal women working at a semiconductor facility in Sanand, Gujarat.
But the Lakhpati Didi initiative is built around a more immediate economic question. Can millions of rural women turn small, often household-based activities into reliable and sustained sources of income? So far 30 million have.