Grand Tamasha: The transformation of India’s welfare regime
Tillin’s book finds that decisions taken in the early post-Independence era had enduring consequences
In India today, so many political debates are focused on welfare and welfarism. It seems that state after state is competing to offer the most electorally attractive benefits to its voters. The central government, for its part, has pioneered a new model of social welfare built around digital identification and direct cash transfers to needy households.
A new book by scholar Louise Tillin, Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy, examines the development of India’s welfare state over the last century from the early decades of the 20th century to the present. In so doing, it recovers a history previously relegated to the margins of scholarship on the political economy of development.
Tillin spoke about her book on a recent episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Till, who serves as a professor of politics in the King’s India Institute at King’s College London, is one of the world’s leading experts on Indian federalism, subnational comparative politics, and social policy.
On the podcast, she spoke with host Milan Vaishnav on what she calls India’s “precocious” welfare regime, the colonial-era debates over social insurance in India, and the pros and cons of the Nehruvian development model. The two also discussed regional variation in modes of social protection and the current debate over welfare and welfarism in India.
“When I describe India’s welfare regime as being somewhat ‘precocious’, I’m actually talking about a certain kind of precocity that really is related to how India bucks what we might have expected at certain historical junctures for a country facing the challenges of economic development that India was,” Tillin clarified.
She pointed to two specific historical moments in Indian history. “The first is in the 1940s, when even before India has finished drafting its constitution and barely a year after it became independent from colonial rule, it legislates on a form of sickness insurance for industrial workers,” she said, adding that India did so before major world economies like the United States or Canada were able to introduce forms of health insurance.
“And the second element [of precocity] refers to another period of political and economic transition in India, that of economic liberalisation, where…unlike many other developing countries that faced structural adjustment somewhat earlier than India, India doesn’t see retrenchment of social policies that we see in other countries,” she said.
Nevertheless, Tillin’s book finds that decisions taken in the early post-Independence era had enduring consequences. “There’s quite a disjuncture at independence,” Tillin argued, citing the birth of contributory social insurance which could have been the kernel of a more universal welfare state. But, “instead what happened, especially from India’s second Five-Year plan onwards, was a very deliberate strategy that India’s planners adopted to favour capital-intensive rather than labour-intensive industrialisation,” she said. “And that decision meant that, right at the outset, India ends with a very truncated welfare state, which protects only a tiny number of workers in the formal sector...and excludes the mass of India’s workforce from its purview.”
Tillin claimed this was a deliberate consequence of the Second Five-Year Plan which, to paraphrase PC Mahalanobis, “sought to create a model of industrialisation that would protect an island of high productivity in a capital-intensive sector that would be low-employing.”
One big takeaway of Tillin’s book is that, while clientelism and resource constraints have severely rationed the provision of public goods and social benefits, Indians have engaged in deliberate debates about what an Indian welfare state should look like. She argued that scholars have often overlooked this fact. “India, for all of its significance in scale and contributions to development theory, has not been so closely theorised as a distinctive welfare regime in its own right,” she writes in her book.
