In the Quest of a Social Democracy

Abstract

The introductory chapter of this book highlights the importance of social protection policies against the background of India’s socio-economic transformation and why it ought to be an important part of the development policy. After succinctly putting forward our fundamental argument—the need for a systems approach to social protection and development resilience as the scope of this system—we highlight our contributions to the existing scholarship in this area. We conclude this chapter by laying out the roadmap for the rest of the chapters to follow in this book.

The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.

—Tryst With Destiny, speech delivered by Jawaharlal Nehru to the Constituent Assembly of India in New Delhi on August 15, 1947.

In his historic speech at the dawn of independence from colonial rule India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru emphatically declared that the freedom from colonial rule also provides a collective responsibility toward “the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity.” Yet, more than seven decades hence, India’s performance on social indicators is sobering. While the country has made considerable progress emerging as one of the global economic giants, yet the behemoth’s ‘feet of clay’ belies its strength.¹ In 2023, India is far wealthier, more entrepreneurial, skilled, educated, urban, and higher life expectancy than in 1947. During the last 75 years, it has seen a substantial decline in poverty, and improvement in the quality of life. The certitude of India’s glorious achievements is however weakened by the persistence of human deprivation, most importantly the ignominy of being home to the largest number of poor people and malnourished children in the world.² While countries at similar levels of economic development at the end of the colonial era in the postwar era have managed to reduce poverty, with some of them now classified as advanced nations, India continues to languish. Broad-based prosperity seems far in sight.

India of today faces a peculiar development challenge which is a combination of developed and developing country problems. It has a problem of scarcity as well as plenty; greater agricultural productivity amidst growing susceptibility to climate threats; improved medical technologies along with rising costs of treatment; higher educational attainments but low employability; and joblessness amidst rising educational levels and economic growth. Spatially, some parts of the country have begun to reflect developmental challenges of middle-income countries like over-nutrition, non-communicable diseases, while one would find traditional symptoms of deprivation—poverty, undernutrition, ill-health, gender disparities, unemployment, conflicts (along caste and religion), and poor public services—continue to characterize the rest. Overall, while famine-like conditions and mass food insecurity are sporadic (if any), prevalence of high malnutrition, joblessness, income insecurity, gender empowerment, and informality in India continue to dot global headlines. The unrealized human potential of millions of citizens portends democratic disenfranchisement, lack of trust in the government, and the risks of intergenerational poverty which are indicative of subdued future growth potential of the nation.³

In India’s development process, failures of the state policy to cure poverty—in its various appearances—is conspicuous which goes against the idea of a vibrant social democracy.⁴ The process of democratic nation-building requires a strong social contract—political, social, and economic—to the ideals of justice, fairness, and equity to increase trust in the government and build fealty to the nation.⁵ The strength of these commitments, the kind of endeavors undertaken, and the institutions primed for attaining these goals determine the nature of long-run economic, social, and human development. While the epigraph of this chapter harps upon the fact that the foundational ethos of the nation-building was based upon this very social pledge of equitable growth, the pathos-filled account of deprivation and suffering of the poor, however, contradicts that such a promise was ever paid obeisance during the seven decades of democratic rule.

Calamitous failure of Indian state to support its poor—from deprivation on multiple counts and enhance their developmental capability—has given rise to a wealth of scholarship discerning this predicament. Proponents of the ‘free market’ earmark India’s state-controlled economic planning as the limiting factor in increasing opportunities for the poor, while those who see a larger role of the government in the economy argue that lack of emphasis on social policy—redistribution, public investments in essential services, and civic empowerment—has restrained India’s human potential.⁶ Neither of these, however, deny India’s significant economic progress as well as the enormous challenge of poverty reduction and sustainable growth. The difference fundamentally lies in the role and design of social policy in facilitating economic development.

Scope of This Book

This book focuses on a specific aspect of India’s social policy—social welfare programs—which is increasingly at the forefront of public debates, academic theorizing, and even electoral sloganeering.⁷ Social welfare programs—which include food assistance, nutritional support to children or pregnant mothers, public works program, social pensions, subsidized health insurance, and cash transfers for various purposes—have emerged as the most important policy instruments to alleviate poverty and risk in the country during the last two decades. This has led to a polarized debate around its need, population coverage, financial feasibility, political undernotes, economic impact, and the ability of the Indian government to deliver welfare to its citizens. Believers in market-based solutions prefer cash and other market-based instruments such as insurance as a more efficient form of welfare transfer, while those wary of the market imperfections rely on commodity-based direct welfare assistance because of India’s patriarchal social norms, underfunded public systems, inefficient markets, limited citizen empowerment, and a fledgling infrastructure. As the debate gets more intense and policy relevant, there is a greater need to understand the source of these tensions and learn from economic theory, global experiences, and its own subnational variation in policy design and implementation to think about the issues of poverty, deprivation, and the role of social safety nets. This book provides a framework to understand India’s social welfare policies—its historical evolution, impact, current limitations, and ideas for the future.

According to 2022 union budget, India spends around 4% of its GDP on social welfare programs. Public Distribution System (PDS) and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) which address food security and rural poverty concerns respectively, are the world’s largest welfare programs of their kind. Under PDS, 820 million people benefit from subsidized food every month while MGNREGS provides 100 days of guaranteed work in a calendar year to more than 100 million people in rural India. In addition, India operates several complementary safety net programs such as the Mid-day Meal Scheme (MDMS), old age pension scheme, and a public health insurance program, targeted to specific demographic groups to address health, malnutrition, and related vulnerability. Despite these measures, India has nearly a quarter of the world’s poor population, highest number of unemployed youths, and the largest number of malnourished children in the world. Why did it take so long for the Indian social policy to recognize social welfare policies as a key tool for redistribution and inclusive growth? How did welfare policies suddenly storm their way into the center of social policy debate in the 2000s? What has been its impact on the poor? How can a country which guarantees its citizen legal ‘rights’ to work and food exhibit extreme forms of poverty and deprivation? How can the Indian state improve its effectiveness in delivering welfare to the poor?

These are questions which require a book length answer to the many challenges of effectively conceptualizing, designing, and implementing a welfare strategy which gets to the bottom of the developmental challenge of a democratic nation which is beginning to modernize yet remains backward on various economic, social, and political indicators. We place this question in a historical context, beginning from period of economic planning in the 1950s and trace its evolution to the current times—a period of 75 years in which India has fundamentally transformed in every regard, social welfare policy included. Across multiple chapters of this book, we deliberate upon the policy design, implementation, and welfare impacts of the array of the welfare programs which have been introduced, rolled back, or re-packaged by the Indian government. We place these policy proclamations as a response to the economic exigencies, demographic changes, and political compulsions of the times.

We argue that India’s development trajectory had two epochal events—agricultural productivity enhancing Green Revolution during the 1970s and the economic reforms of the 1991—which influenced the incidence of poverty as well as the design of anti-poverty policy. While Green Revolution initiated the process of rural poverty decline and arrested food security concerns, economic reforms—globalization and reduction in state-control of the economy—animated the rise of India as a global economic power. A substantial structural transformation which India has undergone since then is characterized by high growth rates, declining importance of agriculture in output and employment, urbanization, rising middle class, greater economic opportunities, and changing dietary patterns. The process of structural transformation, however, has failed to ‘lift all boats’ because economic opportunities arising from agricultural productivity increase as well as services-led growth were differentiated along access to education, credit, capital assets, and social networks. With the skill-based services sector driving this growth process, the larger share of the labor force—larger unskilled or less employable skills—remains in the informal sector, without any employer based social security against loss of employment, illness, or disability. The retrospective analysis of the impact of social welfare programs allows us a more informed engagement with the social policy question going into the future. How can the current safety net system be transformed in an emerging economy, as diverse as India? What ought to be its developmental goal? Should it cover only the poor and the vulnerable, or everyone? What is the most cost-effective way of achieving these goals? How reliable are technological innovations in plugging the traditional leakages in the welfare delivery systems? How to build resilience for the poorest of the poor?

These questions also make us review the fundamental premise of social safety nets—its theoretical underpinnings, institutional design, socio-political context of policy implementation, fiscal requirements, and effectiveness for long-term development. We argue that while standalone welfare schemes are important to address various forms of human deprivation, it is imperative to think about social welfare as a ‘system’ of programs (welfare support) with ‘development resilience’ as its overarching objective (scope).⁸ A systems approach to social welfare addresses the multiple dimensions of poverty along the life cycle of individuals which not only provide a safeguard against risks, but also facilitate full realization of human capital through continuum of assured assistance against various plausible shocks thereby arresting any possible decline in human capabilities and build resilience. The welfare system, therefore, ought to address not only current poverty, but also the slide into future poverty with a focus on both the poor and the non-poor, however the forms of welfare support may differ depending upon the nature of vulnerability. In this book, we argue that if the process of development is not about enhancing human capabilities—instead of just getting individuals over an artificially defined poverty line—safety nets should be envisaged as a tool of enhancing the ability to hold one’s own in the wake of unforeseen calamity. Building household resilience, therefore, ought to be the scope of social welfare systems.

We do not envisage the welfare system to be composed only of the social welfare programs, but it ought to include robust public systems—higher public investment in health, education, and essential public services—which must work in unison to foster an enabling environment for sustained human progress.⁹ While visible public infrastructure (such as roads or markets) along with essential public services (education, health, post offices, etc.) is a key responsibility of the state to reduce physical and financial constraints to economic opportunities, the attainment of these opportunities is realized through the investments in ‘invisible’ infrastructure—state capacity, citizen, empowerment, and public action—essential to ensure public systems work for the poor.¹⁰ A stronger citizen-state social contract is key to build this system where the state commitment to welfare is clearly laid out along with the pathways to achieve so. Resilient societies are the one where there is a collective commitment and shared responsibility toward uplifting the most downtrodden and marginalized members of the community. Building such social democracy would require strengthening of enabling institutions, overcoming perverse political interests, and resolving multiple clashes of ideas.

To build resilience, social welfare policies need to be more encompassing in their approach given the low initial endowments among the poor and the persistence of low-productivity and informal occupation in the developing countries which is bereft of any employment-based social security. Low capital endowments and the absence of market-based insurance mechanisms and decreasing community-based social insurance, economic risks arising from a loss of a job, crop failure, illness, or disability, are always lurking. Demand from the government for social assistance, therefore, becomes the only alternative for the poor and the vulnerable. In a social democracy, government responds to these requests as an essential part of the citizen-state social contract. We, therefore, argue for a wider population coverage (focus) to extend social protection to address the needs of those who got stuck in poverty trap as well as to those who are vulnerable to it. Welfare assistance, therefore, must be designed within the realm of the country’s structural transformation and the ensuing nature of poverty and deprivation which characterizes the various sections of the population. There are multiple alternatives of welfare transfers (form)—food, cash, nutritional assistance, health insurance, etc.—and we highlight that the decision to pick one over the other ought to be situated to socio-economic and political context. Moreover, while each of the multiple social welfare policies work with a developmental goal (scope), a resilient welfare system would be achieved when they are able to collectively able to address various dimensions of deprivation along the human life cycle.

Social Safety Nets as an Enabler of Development Resilience

State intervention in the form of social safety nets is primarily motivated from concerns of redistribution, filling in for missing markets or market failures than inhibits a household’s ability to cope with shocks and invest in productive asset accumulation, or reducing household’s behavioral constraints.¹¹ Poor households are vulnerable to frequent crop loss, unemployment, untimely death, or famine which leads to loss of income, livelihood, and property in the short run and impairs their long-term ability to function in full capacity. Such risks are particularly high for those with low endowments of human and physical capital. In the developing countries where markets (labor, credit, and insurance) are underdeveloped, welfare transfers provide a protective or safety floor against the likelihood of falling into ‘poverty trap’ through state intervention to fill in for market imperfections.¹²

Social safety nets have emerged as one of the most important policy instruments to alleviate poverty and risk in the last two decades. According to the most recent estimates, around 2.5 billion people globally are covered by safety nets, through which 36% of the very poor have managed to escape from extreme poverty (World Bank 2018). Social protection policies were also utilized globally as perhaps the most potent policy tool to address economic insecurity created by unprecedented exogenous shock of the pandemic, COVID-19.¹³

Historically, the advanced nations of today relied upon a slew of state-sponsored welfare programs during their modernization process since the early twentieth century to support its working population against the newer risks which emerged from the process of industrialization, decline in community-based mutual insurance, greater rural to urban migration, and a more complex economic structure.¹⁴ As developing countries are undergoing structural transformation, there has been a concerted attempt at creating an expansive social protection architecture. The safety nets agenda, promoted by the World Bank and other global agencies in the 1990s, has also accorded prominence to it in the “global fight against poverty.”¹⁵ Cash transfers—unconditional and conditional—as pioneered by Brazil, Mexico, China, and South Africa have particularly championed these reforms which have spread to other developing countries like Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh who have enunciated various other social welfare programs. Yet, in the low-income countries, only 20% of the population is protected through any form of safety net which implies that the redistributive impact has been below its potential, with the poorest of the poor still being left behind.¹⁶ Limited financial resources, inadequate state capacity to implement welfare programs, and weak citizen-state social contract are offered as potential examples for lack of a comprehensive welfare strategy in the poorer countries. Concomitantly, the effectiveness of welfare programs is also influenced by how its need—the nature of poverty and deprivation—is theoretically conceived by the economic planners.

Until very recently, the development thinking—across both academic and practice communities—envisaged safety nets as a policy tool to ensure that standard of living of the poorest person does not fall below a minimum subsistence level.¹⁷ Re-conceptualization of safety nets, however, recognizes it not only as a response to existing poverty but also as an adaptive strategy to unforeseen adverse economic shocks.¹⁸ The scholarship on poverty and risks has evolved to account for the variation within the poor as well considering the vulnerability of non-poor to falling into poverty, arising out of the multiple kinds of market failures.¹⁹ Households at different levels of human endowments require a different policy response and therefore an equivalent amount of transfer is not likely to have the same benefit to all households. As a result, the state response to poverty requires more progressive transfers which brings the poorest households to a certain ‘social minimum’ while protecting the non-poor against any possible slide into poverty.²⁰

Research has shown that a limited amount of social assistance allows only those who are just below the poverty threshold to escape the poverty trap with a negligible effect on those at a very low level of well-being.²¹ Therefore, while the poorest households may benefit from more progressive transfers, the vulnerable but non-poor groups can benefit from some form of contingent transfers to sustain themselves above a subsistence consumption level.²² Keeping everyone outside the poverty trap, above a minimum level of consumption, therefore has a multiplier effect on the economy which increases overall welfare. As a result, anti-poverty policies not only need to address the structural inequalities in financial and human capital endowments, but also provide them sufficient support in the wake of economic losses—crop, livelihood, or health. A robust anti-poverty strategy, as a result, need to address both—transitions in and out of poverty—for infusing resilience into the development process. By providing an opportunity to escape poverty, safety nets can help improve the standard of living, arrest the erosion of physical capital, provide human dignity, and reduce interpersonal inequality. However, such a transformational impact requires timely, sustained, and formidable amount of welfare transfer.

Contributions to the Indian Social Policy Debate

Social welfare programs have been one of the most researched aspects of social policy in India lately. The credibility revolution in economics, the mantra of ‘evidence-based policy’ in development practice, availability of rich household survey data, creative research designs, and gigabytes of public available administrative data on various schemes have made program evaluation a key component of any empirically minded economist’s curriculum vitae. India’s range of social welfare has provided an abundant field to scholars domestically and abroad to test their theoretical and empirical tools to suggest ways to improve the ‘plumbing’ of the various social welfare schemes through analyzing their imperfect implementation, welfare impacts and offered novel solutions to improve performance.²³ The wealth of scholarship which has emerged in the last two decades on the impact of social welfare programs however lacks a unifying framework to understand the rising importance of social welfare policies, their impact, and future innovations within the realm of India’s economic transformation, social change, and democratic strengthening.

The burgeoning empirical research on India’s safety nets reflects is beset with a fundamental challenge. These isolated studies—focusing on the effectiveness of specific welfare schemes, at a certain point in time—focus on a narrow plumbing question without much cognizance to the welfare system architecture. We would show in later parts of the book that the same welfare schemes could have a favorable impact in one region, while not in the other. Several contextual factors could explain this difference, which is not often observable to the researcher or beyond their theoretical paradigms. Program evaluations, despite their crucial importance, could “miss the woods for the trees.” Such oversight is particularly common when evaluations of social welfare programs depend upon the quality of program implementation, population coverage, along with the nature of poverty and overall economic structure which are neither time-invariant nor spatially uniform across a country as large as India. This book’s contribution therefore lies in extending beyond the limited set of plumbing tools to carry out a comprehensive ‘house-inspection’ of the emerging social welfare architecture. In doing so, while we deliberate upon the planning and design of the various schemes, we also theorize and envisage how these schemes working together could foster a resilient development process in the future.

To the best of our knowledge, there are only two benchmark study of similar scope.²⁴ In 2011, World Bank came out with a report which contained a detailed review of all the major social protection programs in India with suggested policy measures. Economist Jean Drèze similarly edited a volume which had a collection of empirical research on various social safety nets in India, from the many volumes of the policy journal, Economic and Political Weekly. In the last decade, social welfare policies have undergone a rapid transformation—in terms of their focus, form, and scope—which we update but more importantly this book is not about technocratic solutions to ‘fix’ the problems but rather it makes us think about the nature of the problem itself, its relevance under the current contextual nuances (economic as well as political) with a vision for the future. While analyzing each of the welfare programs—against the development needs against which they were created (scope), the intended beneficiaries of the program (focus), and the nature of welfare support (form)—our focus is always on the ‘big picture’ question of long-term improvement in human welfare.

This book is also an important contribution to the study of social development in India. While several other scholars of repute have highlighted the limited success of Indian state in reducing poverty and deprivation, the point of departure for this book lies in the singular focus on social welfare programs.²⁵ We analyze social policy change and its drivers through carefully scrutinizing policy documents since the 1950s, multiple government reports, news pieces, and tomes of scholarly work on India’s development trajectory. Big-picture economic thinking, however, cannot disregard politics. The social welfare question, specifically, is a political one both in design as well as implementation. In this book, we delve into great length to argue that future of welfare programs and its reforms lies in political coalition building with citizen at the center. The insights offered here combine a range of scholarship—theoretical and empirical—on poverty, social policy, economic development from a comparative perspective.

In terms of theoretical innovations, this book brings a systems approach to the social welfare debate in India and argues for development resilience as the scope of this system. We approach the social welfare question not merely as a tool of improving the many metrics of human deprivation, but as an enabler of human resilience through various forms of welfare interventions which address current as well as the future incidence of poverty in its various expressions. We envisage the expansion of social safety nets not only as a policy tool to support the poor, but to build their capability with the ideas of bridging the endowment gaps between the haves and have-nots—or India versus Bharat (India’s pre-historical name)—and foster resilience against the fragility of economic lives in the wake of impending economic, social, or environmental change.

In their most recent book, Good Economics for Hard Times, Nobel Laureate economists, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, remark that the “goal of social policy, in these times of change and anxiety, is to help people absorb the shocks that affect them without allowing those shocks to affect their sense of themselves. Unfortunately, this is not the system we have inherited. Our social protection still has its Victorian overlay, and all too many politicians do not try to hide their contempt for the poor and disadvantaged. Even with a shift in attitude, social protection will require a profound rethinking and an injection of lots of imagination.” They further note that, “we clearly don’t have all the solutions, and suspect nobody else does either. We have much more to learn. But as long as we understand what the goal is, we can win.” This book has a similarly modest aim. We do not claim to have an answer to all the challenges of social safety net in India. Rather, we have provided a framework which allows us to pose relevant questions and generate a debate which is theoretically sound and empirically grounded in India’s economic reality. Economist John Maynard Keynes is often attributed (erroneously, it seems) to have remarked that “it is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”²⁶ In truly Keynesian spirit (even if it is wrongly attributed to him), our policy prescriptions are based upon the economic structure inherited from past policies and the forces of globalization which are unfolding and would likely shape the future. There are assumptions—some of which may reflect our biases—which may or may not hold the test of time. What is important, however, is to have an informed deliberation around questions which we care about amidst the changing nature of economic risks, vulnerabilities, and the quest for a resilient society.

Roadmap

In the subsequent chapters of the book, we begin focusing on individual programs, deliberate upon their origins, evidence around their effectiveness, and how they could be redesigned in the future.

We begin by describing a general schema for the global expansion of social welfare policies along the path of structural transformation in Chapter 2. Based upon theoretical underpinnings of ‘social welfare’ and the learning around the implementation of social welfare in India and abroad, we highlight the rising importance of more demand-side promotive measures (to stop the flow into poverty) of social assistance along with the traditional preventive measures (consumption support to the already poor). We place these arguments in the context of changing economic structure of the developing countries which is characterized by questions around informal employment, gig economy, and the ensuing livelihood risks and vulnerability. In this chapter, we frame poverty as a multidimensional, multi-scalar, and dynamic concept which allows us to approach the issue of social protection as a system, and not only as standalone schemes. The ideas presented here become a source of motivation for the chapters to follow where we focus on the Indian context.

In Chapter 3, we analyze India’s reliance on social welfare policies as a response to various developmental deficits from a historical perspective which allows us to review the successes and failures of these schemes in terms of their design, implementation, and welfare impact in the context of India’s structural transformation and poverty reduction. We discuss the variety of anti-poverty programs—food transfers, public works, mother and child support, social pensions, and health insurance—as they were progressively introduced over the course of last seven decades. In this chapter, we also highlight the subnational differences in economic and human development outcomes to show that the poorest regions have been lacking in enhancing the effective implementation of welfare programs. Looking into the future, we argue that welfare programs of the future must be attuned to the changing economic and demographic transformation of the economy—as characterized by stagnant farm income, slower pace of urbanization, deindustrialization of the economy, and rising informality of employment—to facilitate a resilient development process.

In the following chapters (Chapters 4–7), we discuss a family of social protection schemes under a common developmental objective (such as income, food security, or nutrition), unpack its theoretical rationale, provide its historical imperative, deliberate upon the implementation design, summarize its impact, discuss policy relevance, and conclude with suggestions for the future. In Chapter 4, we lay out the nature of poverty, livelihood arrangements, economic structure, and ensuing developmental challenges facing the country. Drawing upon the economic policy documents, we specifically discuss how poverty has been synonymous with famines and hunger, in rural India, which gets reflected in the design of social safety nets. As the most important instrument of rural poverty reduction, we discuss the importance of the public works program in contributing to rural prosperity, along with an emphasis on social pensions for the elderly, and newly introduced cash transfers for the farmers. We also highlight that with changes in economic and demographic structure, urban livelihood challenges are now as rampant prominent with rising informality of employment. Lack of employer-based social security and rising threats of climate change have also exacerbated vulnerability for the non-poor. We, therefore, argue for a more dynamic and encompassing social welfare policies in the future which not only need to expand their focus to urban poor but are also geared toward addressing the emerging sources of poverty and vulnerability.

In the following chapter (Chapter 5), we investigate the role of in-kind food transfers through PDS in reducing hunger and improving nutrition. PDS, arguably the most debated of all social welfare schemes in India, has a long history going back to its introduction as a relief measure for urban workers during the Second World War. It continues to be a major source of relief for the poor, with food transfers being a major source of welfare support during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Yet, it is beset with numerous challenges, fundamental to which is its reliance upon the state-driven farm procurement of food grains, which has distortionary market effects and compromises food system diversity and ecological sustainability. We deliberate upon these factors, including the political economy of it which abets the procurement–stocking–distribution ‘gordian knot’ to argue that any replacement of PDS with cash transfers—a key social policy debate—is essentially tied to the reforms in the agricultural sector.

It is widely known that early life nutritional assistance has a transformational effect on human capabilities through improvements in child health outcomes which further increase cognitive skills, work productivity, and halts the intergenerational persistence of poverty. Social welfare policies in India, however, did not pay much attention to these programs till very recently. Currently, nutritional assistance for mother and child under Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) and free school afternoon meal under the Mid-day Meal Scheme (MDMS), along with maternity transfers to encourage institutional delivery are the key programs to address early life undernutrition and child health issues. In Chapter 6, we study the performance of such programs which are ameliorating intergenerational poverty. We argue that despite success in improving child outcomes, these are beset with operational challenges that could make them more potent instruments of addressing child malnutrition. We highlight these challenges as overworked, demotivated, and underpaid staff at the ICDS centers, poor quality of meals in schools, and narrowly targeted maternal cash transfers for institutional delivery. Put together, these factors highlight the limited state capacity of the public systems which are essentially designed to cater to the poorer sections of the population as the relatively well-off sections of the population have already moved on toward private provisions of school and health, in the expectation of better quality.

While food and nutritional assistance have been the traditional forms of social safety nets in India, the scope of safety nets in improving health outcomes and supporting households against health shocks has been recognized only lately in the country. In Chapter 7, we discuss the importance of improved health as a fundamental pillar of economic development. Health continues to be an ignored area of social policy despite an agreement on adverse health shocks as a primary reason for slides into poverty, even for the non-poor. India’s health care was designed along the lines of the British National Health Services (NHS) where seeking health care would be free for all. Yet, the availability and quality of health care in India has been abysmally poor while has led to a de facto private health care system which is expensive and unaffordable even to non-poor. In the early 2000s, subsidized public health insurance, targeted at the poor, has been introduced as a newer form of safety net. However, health insurance has had moderate success in India due to a poor health infrastructure, both in quality and reach. With the rising burden of no communicable diseases (NCDs) and increasing out-of-pocket patient health costs, health insurance will grow in importance to stem the tide of poverty. An emerging but sparse empirical literature on India suggests its limited effectiveness in Northern India, where other forms of social safety nets have lesser effectiveness, too, further calling into question the regional disparities in governance and state capacity across the country.

Chapter 8 discusses why social welfare schemes in India have been unable to build resilience despite the expansion of social welfare programs. Approaching this question through the lens of policymaking, we argue that the potential welfare impacts of social safety nets have been undermined because of restrictive ideas of human welfare and poverty, perverse political interests, and discriminatory last-mile institutions. The three I’s of policymaking also allow us to deliberate upon the subnational differences in welfare outcome through laying out the divergent ideas which motivate citizen welfare, the institutions which were designed to deliver the welfare benefits, and how it shaped political interests, in this chapter. The arguments presented here—which suggest a failure of social policy in building an inclusive social welfare system—rely upon a rich vein of scholarship on policy science, institutional economics, and comparative politics.

Given a book with such a broad scope, we cannot shy away from engaging with the most pressing contemporary debates around social safety nets in country. In Chapter 9, we focus on the following central questions which hold the talisman for the future design of Indian social welfare policies: Can food transfers be replaced with cash? Would universalization of welfare programs increase its effectiveness? How can technological innovations overcome implementational hurdles which have traditionally plagued the welfare delivery systems? Is universal basic income (UBI) a feasible alternative to the array of poorly implemented welfare schemes in the country? Does India have the fiscal wherewithal and organization capability to manage and fund an expansive set of social safety nets?

Chapter 10 concludes the discussions in this book with a summary of the various insights generated in each of the chapters and lays out suggestions for the design of social welfare policies in the future. We highlight the need to imagine a social welfare system rather than just a mixture of independent schemes to engender a resilient development process.