Money For Nothing

Here's how Hridayesh Gupta's incentive scheme works:

• Women between the ages of 18 and 28 are eligible.
  
  
• For every three months that they do not get pregnant, they receive Rs 250 per month.
  
  
• If they don't get pregnant for over a year, it gets them an increment. If they do, the payment is scrapped.
  
  
• Traditional midwives, or dais, establish whether the women are pregnant or not at camps held in the project zone.
  
  
• In the next phase of his project, Gupta wants to cover five areas and about 40,000 women in all. This works out to an outlay of Rs 12 crore, or $2.6 million, a year.
  
  
• He has so far spent $25,000 (Rs 11.47 lakh) of his own money, and hopes to keep the project going till the youngest woman in his group turns 33, which is another 15 years.