The Welfare State

India as a welfare state

This is the section that should be longest, because it is where the topic meets the reader's own subject.

The commitment is constitutional. The Preamble declares the resolve to secure justice, social, economic and political, and equality of status and opportunity. The Directive Principles of State Policy in Part IV set out the welfare programme directly: the state is to strive to promote the welfare of the people by securing a social order in which justice, social, economic and political, informs all the institutions of national life; to direct its policy towards securing adequate means of livelihood, the distribution of ownership of material resources to subserve the common good, and equal pay for equal work; to make provision for just and humane conditions of work and maternity relief, and for public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sickness and disablement; to secure a living wage; to raise the level of nutrition and public health; and to provide free and compulsory education for children.

The Directive Principles are not enforceable by any court, and that is itself a sociologically interesting fact: the welfare commitment was written as a direction to the state rather than as a right of the citizen, which located it in politics rather than in litigation.

The judicial development. Over time several welfare guarantees were brought within the enforceable fundamental rights by interpretation, and the right to education was later made an express fundamental right by constitutional amendment, with the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 giving it statutory shape.

The statutory programme. India's welfare state is built substantially through legislation, and the examples worth naming are those that create rights: the National Food Security Act 2013; the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005, which creates a legal entitlement to a specified number of days of unskilled manual work; the Right to Information Act 2005, which is a welfare measure in the sense that it makes entitlements claimable; the Code on Social Security 2020, which consolidates earlier social security legislation; and the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Act 2007, discussed in [Changing Patterns of the Family].

The distinctive Indian pattern, and the point that lifts an answer: India adopted the objectives of a developed welfare state at a level of income at which the countries that pioneered them had not yet attempted them. The consequence is a wide gap between the entitlement and the delivery, and a welfare system that operates heavily through targeted schemes and rationing rather than through universal provision.

The criticisms

Give these fairly, since an answer that only praises the concept is incomplete.

1. Cost and fiscal strain, particularly where the tax base is narrow.
2. Dependence. The argument that guaranteed provision weakens the incentive to work and to save. It is asserted more often than it is demonstrated, and saying so is fair.
3. Bureaucracy. Welfare requires administration, and administration brings delay, discretion, rent-seeking and the humiliation of applicants. Foucault's account of disciplinary power in [Post Modernism] is directly relevant: welfare is delivered through registration, inspection and classification.
4. Targeting errors. Both exclusion, of those entitled who do not receive, and inclusion, of those not entitled who do. In a country of India's size both are large in absolute numbers, and exclusion is the more serious because it falls on the poorest.
5. Paternalism. The state decides what people need.
6. The gap between promise and delivery, which is corrosive of trust in the state itself, and is the strongest criticism in the Indian context.

A worked example

A rural household is entitled to subsidised foodgrain under the National Food Security Act 2013.

As a legal entitlement it is straightforward: eligibility, quantity, price and a mechanism for grievance.

As a social process it involves several steps at each of which the entitlement can fail: the household must be identified as eligible in a list prepared by an administrative process; it must possess documents, which requires literacy or a broker; it must reach a fair price shop that is open and stocked; and it must be able to complain effectively if the quantity is short.

Who fails at each step is socially patterned, not random: the least literate, the most remote, the most recently migrated, the least connected to local political networks. A welfare state's real coverage is therefore not measured by its statute book but by who is standing at the end of the queue, and that measurement is a sociological exercise, using exactly the survey methods in Module III.

What a welfare state is NOT

It is not socialism. A welfare state accepts private ownership and the market and corrects their results. A socialist state seeks to change ownership itself. The distinction is regularly muddled in answers.

It is not charity. The provision is a matter of right, and that is the whole point of the concept.

It is not the same as a large state. A state may be large and not welfare-oriented, and a state may deliver welfare through transfers with a small administration.

It is not merely a policy. In India it is a constitutional commitment, which is what distinguishes the Indian case from a country where welfare depends on which government is in office.

Quick revision

1. A welfare state accepts responsibility for the social and economic well-being of citizens, providing minimum standards as of right, in contrast to the police or laissez-faire state.
2. It arose because industry destroyed the family, caste and village arrangements that met these needs, and because the franchise made the poor politically significant. Germany's social insurance of the 1880s; the Beveridge Report 1942 and its five giants: want, disease, ignorance, squalor, idleness.
3. Characteristics: positive functions, guaranteed minimum standards, social security, services, redistribution, economic regulation, full employment as an objective, democratic means.
4. In India the commitment is constitutional: the Preamble and the Directive Principles in Part IV, which are not enforceable by any court.
5. The statutory programme includes the National Food Security Act 2013, the rural employment guarantee of 2005, the Right to Information Act 2005, the Code on Social Security 2020, and the right to education, made a fundamental right by amendment and implemented by the Act of 2009.
6. India adopted developed-country welfare objectives at a low level of income, which is why the gap between entitlement and delivery is the central Indian problem.
7. Criticisms: cost, dependence, bureaucracy, exclusion and inclusion errors, paternalism, and the gap between promise and delivery.

Test yourself

1. Define the welfare state and contrast it with the police state. A welfare state assumes primary responsibility for the social and economic well-being of its citizens, guaranteeing minimum standards of income, health, education, housing and social security as a matter of right, and intervening in the economy to reduce inequality and insecurity. A police or laissez-faire state confines itself to maintaining order, providing defence and enforcing contracts, leaving well-being to the family, the market and charity.

2. Why did the welfare state emerge? Because industrialisation destroyed the arrangements that had met these needs: it moved people away from kin, made income depend on a wage that ceased with the work, produced unemployment as a structural condition and concentrated poverty visibly in cities. Poverty came to be understood as a consequence of the economy rather than of character, the extension of the franchise made the poor politically important, and the existence of a revolutionary alternative made reform attractive.

3. How is India's welfare commitment expressed constitutionally, and with what limitation? Through the Preamble's resolve to secure social, economic and political justice and equality of status and opportunity, and above all through the Directive Principles of State Policy in Part IV, which direct the state to secure adequate means of livelihood, just conditions of work, a living wage, public assistance in unemployment, old age, sickness and disablement, improved nutrition and public health, and free and compulsory education. The limitation is that the Directive Principles are not enforceable by any court, so the commitment was placed in politics rather than in litigation.

4. What is distinctive about the Indian welfare state? That India adopted the objectives of a developed welfare state at a level of national income far below that at which the pioneering countries attempted them. The consequence is a wide gap between entitlement and delivery, a reliance on targeted schemes and rationing rather than universal provision, and a system in which the practical question is less what the law promises than who succeeds in obtaining it.

5. Give three criticisms of the welfare state. That it is costly and strains public finances, particularly where the tax base is narrow; that its delivery requires an administration which brings delay, discretion, rent-seeking and the humiliation of applicants; and that targeting produces both exclusion of the entitled and inclusion of the ineligible, of which exclusion is the more serious because it falls on precisely the people the provision exists for. To these is added the corrosive effect on trust of a persistent gap between promise and delivery.