Garima Greh is the name of the government-supported shelter homes for transgender persons in India. They are one part of the SMILE scheme (Support for Marginalized Individuals for Livelihood and Enterprise), which the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment runs. Each home is meant for up to 25 residents. It gives food, a safe place to live, medical care and skills training, and it is run by a community-based organisation with money from the Centre. This guide explains the garima greh smile scheme in plain words: what it offers, who can stay, how much money is involved, whether Bihar has a home, how to apply, and what has gone wrong.
We use official sources first: Press Information Bureau (PIB) releases, the scheme guidelines and the department's own website. Where a number comes from a news report or a summary, we say so.
Key takeaways
- SMILE was launched on 12 February 2022. It has two parts: one for transgender persons and one for people engaged in begging.
- The scheme had ₹365 crore for 2021-22 to 2025-26. Of this, ₹265 crore was for the transgender part, according to PIB.
- In a Rajya Sabha reply on 11 February 2026, the government said 23 Garima Grehs were being supported across 17 States and Union Territories.
- Bihar has one listed Garima Greh, in Patna, run by the organisation Dostanasafar.
- Several shelters have told reporters that grants arrived late or not at all. One shelter in Chennai briefly shut, according to Feminism in India.
What is the SMILE scheme?
SMILE is an umbrella scheme. That means it groups smaller schemes under one name. Union Minister Dr. Virendra Kumar launched it in New Delhi on 12 February 2022, according to the PIB release on the launch.
It has two sub-schemes:
- The Central Sector Scheme for Comprehensive Rehabilitation for Welfare of Transgender Persons.
- The Central Sector Scheme for Comprehensive Rehabilitation of persons engaged in the act of Begging.
The transgender part has several pieces. PIB lists scholarships for students from Class IX up to post-graduation, skills training under a scheme called PM-DAKSH, a health package linked to Ayushman Bharat (PM-JAY), Transgender Protection Cells in each state to track crimes, a national portal and helpline, and housing in the form of Garima Greh.
Nearly every one of these benefits needs a transgender certificate from the National Portal for Transgender Persons. Our step-by-step guide on how to get a transgender certificate and ID card explains that process.
What is a Garima Greh and what does it offer?
Garima means dignity, and greh means home. A Garima Greh is a shelter home for transgender persons who have no safe place to live, often because their family has rejected them. The department's current guidelines, issued by circular on 6 February 2025, describe the aim as shelter "with basic amenities like shelter, food, medical care and recreational facilities", plus skills training.
According to those guidelines, a home should offer:
- Lodging, meals, clothing and bedding.
- Medical care and counselling.
- Recreation, such as books, indoor games and television.
- Skills training and help finding work.
- Help to link residents with other schemes, such as pensions, housing and health cover.
The guidelines also set rules for how a home is run. These are the main ones.
| Rule in the guidelines | What it says |
|---|---|
| Size | A home is planned for 25 residents |
| Staff | 11 posts, including a project director, project manager, counsellor, cook and three watchmen |
| Who runs it | A registered society, trust or non-profit company. The project director must be from the transgender community |
| Oversight | A project management committee chaired by the District Magistrate or a nominee, with a doctor, an expert, an NGO member and one resident. It should meet every month |
| Length of stay | Up to one year. The home should not be used as a transit house |
| Money | Unit cost of ₹36,46,500 per home. New grants are paid in two instalments |
| Safety | CCTV in common rooms, entry and exit registers, and a location in a quiet residential area |
Who can stay in a Garima Greh?
The guidelines list these selection rules for residents:
- The person holds a transgender certificate issued through the National Portal for Transgender Persons. Preference goes to people living below the poverty line.
- The person is above 18 years old and has been abandoned.
- The person is not engaged in sex work or begging.
- The person faces stigma and discrimination.
The third rule is worth noting. Many people in the hijra and kinnar community have long earned a living through badhai (blessing) work or begging, often because other work was closed to them. The guidelines expect residents to move into training and jobs instead. Our glossary of kinnar, hijra and transgender terms explains these words.
How big is the scheme? Budget and number of homes
The money for SMILE was announced as a five-year total. A PIB backgrounder dated 5 May 2025 gives the yearly split for the transgender part: ₹25 crore in 2021-22, ₹46.31 crore in 2022-23, ₹52.91 crore in 2023-24, ₹63.90 crore in 2024-25 and ₹76.88 crore in 2025-26. That adds up to ₹265 crore. The same paper says that, as of 1 April 2025, ₹6.8 crore had been released to and used by Garima Grehs.
A later PIB feature dated 20 April 2026 repeats the ₹365 crore total in its text, but its summary box says ₹390 crore. The difference comes from a larger figure for the begging part. The transgender figure stays at ₹265 crore in both papers.
The number of homes has grown, but the official figures do not always match. This table puts them in order.
| When | Number of Garima Grehs | Source |
|---|---|---|
| November 2020 | First home e-inaugurated in Vadodara, run with Lakshya Trust | News reports of the launch |
| 2021 pilot | 12 pilot homes | Scheme guidelines and portal FAQ |
| 11 February 2026 | 23 homes supported in 17 States/UTs, 6 of them new in 2025-26 | PIB, Rajya Sabha reply by Minister of State B. L. Verma |
| 20 April 2026 | 21 operational in 17 states, plus 3 sanctioned in August 2025 | PIB feature |
| August 2026 | 23 homes in 17 States/UTs, 1,041 people rehabilitated in three years | Organiser, citing official figures |
The February 2026 reply also said something important: "No roadmap has been proposed at present to establish at least one Garima Greh in every State capital within the next five years." The guidelines, however, say it is "important to have one Garima Greh in each state/UT".
A current-affairs summary of an August 2026 PIB release says an outside review of SMILE was done by NIRDPR, Hyderabad, in late 2025 and that the guidelines were revised to run the scheme from 2026-27 to 2030-31. We could not open the original release, so we treat that as unconfirmed.
Is there a Garima Greh in Bihar or Patna?
Yes. The department's official list of Garima Greh shelter homes (last updated 12 July 2026) shows one home in Bihar. It is run by Dostanasafar in Patna district, with Reshma Prasad as project director. The listed phone number is 8409834552. Please call before you visit, because contact details can change.
Drishti IAS reported in December 2023 that the home is in Khagaul, on the edge of Patna, and credited Reshma Prasad's work for it. The same report said she had been named to the Patna University Senate, and called her the first transgender person to sit on any university senate in the country. In June 2024, Patna Press reported a certificate camp at Khagaul, backed by UNDP India and attended by a Bihar Social Welfare Department officer. It said 70 people came and 31 applied for transgender certificates.
We did not find a separate shelter home for transgender persons run by the Bihar government itself. We also found no official figure for how many people the Patna home has housed.
Bihar now also has a state welfare board for the community, set up in August 2025. That board is the body whose member proposed the Modi Mandir. Read how state transgender welfare boards work and recent developments on the Bihar board for that story.
How to get a place in a Garima Greh
There is no single national application form for residents that we could find. Based on the guidelines and the official list, these are the practical steps:
- Get your transgender certificate. It is the first eligibility rule. You apply through the National Portal for Transgender Persons.
- Find the nearest home. Use the official list linked above. It gives the organisation, district and contact person for each home.
- Contact the home directly. The organisation running it selects residents under the guidelines, with the district committee watching over it.
- Ask your district Social Welfare office if there is no home in your state. They may know of other shelters or schemes.
For organisations that want to run a home: new proposals go through the ministry's e-Anudaan grants portal. A notice dated 30 April 2025 invited applications for "Gap States/UTs" (places without a home) from 1 to 31 May 2025. A later memo kept the portal open until 30 June 2025. The organisation must have been registered for at least two years and must be listed on the NGO Darpan portal.
Criticism and gaps: late grants and closures
The biggest complaint is money arriving late. Here is what the shelters themselves told reporters:
- Delhi, 2022. The Quint reported on 9 December 2022 that a Delhi Garima Greh had gone without government funds for months. A counsellor said the cook had left because the home could not pay her.
- Delhi, 2024. The Mooknayak reported on 18 April 2024 that the Mitr Trust home in Delhi had received no funds for the previous financial year. It also said pilot grants were paid in a 40-40-20 split, and that Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand had no home at that time.
- Several cities, 2025. Feminism in India reported on 30 July 2025 that the Delhi home went more than 15 months without funds. It said the Chennai home briefly shut and later moved after an eviction. Ludhiana had received only its first instalment. Indore, set up in November 2024, had no government money nine months later, and Jaipur had cut its capacity.
There are other gaps in the official record too:
- Skills training. The February 2026 Rajya Sabha reply said no transgender beneficiaries were certified under PM-DAKSH in 2024-25.
- Coverage. About 17 States and UTs have a home, so many states have none. The official list shows no home in Rajasthan, Kerala or Telangana, for example. Rajasthan was named as a pilot state in the portal's FAQ, and we could not find out why it no longer appears.
- Old text. The official shelter page still says "Currently there are 12 Garima Greh's in the country", even though its own table lists 23.
We asked ourselves whether these reports show the whole picture. They do not. They come from a handful of shelters that agreed to speak. We did not see a ministry response in these stories, and we found no official figure for how many homes are short of money today.
How does Garima Greh fit with other welfare for transgender persons?
Garima Greh is only one piece. The same certificate also opens the scholarship, the PM-DAKSH training and the Ayushman Bharat TG Plus health cover of ₹5 lakh a year. The legal base is the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, which tells governments to make welfare schemes. Our guide to the 2019 Act covers that law.
The law changed in 2026. The amendment added a medical board to the certificate process. Since every Garima Greh resident needs a certificate, any slowdown in certificates could affect who can get a place. See what the 2026 amendment changed. We found no official statement on how the amendment affects Garima Greh admissions.
What we could not verify
- How many people live in Garima Grehs today. The only figure we found is 1,041 rehabilitated over three years, from an August 2026 report.
- Whether the SMILE scheme has a confirmed budget after March 2026. We saw a summary, not the official release.
- How the Patna home is doing, including its funding and how many residents it has.
- The exact date the first home opened. News reports say November 2020 in Vadodara. Government papers say the homes were piloted in 2021.
Common questions
What is the Garima Greh SMILE scheme?
Garima Greh is the shelter home part of SMILE, a central scheme of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment. Each home is planned for 25 transgender residents and gives food, shelter, medical care and skills training for up to one year.
How many Garima Grehs are there in India?
The government told the Rajya Sabha on 11 February 2026 that 23 Garima Grehs were being supported in 17 States and Union Territories. A PIB feature in April 2026 said 21 were operational, with 3 more sanctioned.
Is there a Garima Greh in Patna?
Yes. The official list shows one home in Patna district, run by Dostanasafar with Reshma Prasad as project director. Reports place it in Khagaul, on the edge of Patna.
Who can live in a Garima Greh?
The guidelines say residents should hold a transgender certificate from the National Portal, be over 18 and abandoned, face stigma, and not be engaged in sex work or begging. People below the poverty line get preference.
Sources
- Union Minister Dr. Virendra Kumar launches SMILE scheme, PIB, 12 February 2022.
- SMILE: Towards Dignity, Opportunity and Inclusion, PIB backgrounder, 5 May 2025.
- SMILE scheme: Rajya Sabha reply, PIB, 11 February 2026.
- From Margins to Mainstream: How SMILE Is Transforming Lives, PIB feature, 20 April 2026.
- Updated SMILE guidelines, transgender sub-scheme, Department of Social Justice and Empowerment.
- Garima Greh shelter homes list, Department of Social Justice and Empowerment.
- The Crumbling Promise of Trans Shelters, Feminism in India, 30 July 2025.
- When Will All Indian States Have Garima Grahas?, The Mooknayak, 18 April 2024.
- Transgender person made Patna University Senate member, Drishti IAS, 7 December 2023.
Last checked on 27 October 2026. This page is general information, not legal or welfare advice. Spotted a mistake? Tell us through our contact page.