India runs one of the largest social welfare networks in the world and is increasingly talking about it, at least in its political discourse, as if it were something to be ashamed of. The linguistic shift has become more pronounced in the last decade or so, and programs that for a time tended to be viewed as rights are now referred to as “rights.” “Freebies” given out by the government.
One reason for this may be that the purpose and use of these programs have changed – they are increasingly seen as a political tool rather than something a government owes its citizens. The rhetoric is not just political; It has also found support and acceptance among the general public.
Reetika Khera is a professor at IIT Delhi and has spent more than two decades studying the social architecture of India and the role it has played and continues to play in the lives of millions of its citizens. The idea behind the book, as she describes it, is to introduce this architecture to the Indian public so that readers can see for themselves, beyond the noise, why these programs were introduced in the first place, how they have performed against their goals, and whether they are worth continuing and supporting.
Image via IIT Delhi
To do this, she goes through seven programs that make up the largest part of India’s social security net and accompany a citizen from cradle to grave.
Maternity benefits are a good start; On paper, it is one of the most progressive measures of its kind, guaranteeing a woman 26 weeks of paid maternity leave. One catch is that as per the Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, amended in 2017, this policy only covers women in the organized sector and almost 93 percent of India’s workforce works informally, which is completely outside its purview. The scheme intended to cover this majority, Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana or PMMVY, pays Rs 5,000 for a first child and reaches the full Rs 6,000 only for a second child and only if that child is a girl. Compared to 26 weeks of paid leave in the formal sector, the difference is clear. But it’s still a support measure, and in some states additional increases are helping to give pregnant women more financial security.
India has improved significantly over the years, although the country still has a long way to go in terms of child malnutrition, stunting and wasting. One of the main reasons for this improvement was the work of Anganwadis, which is run under the Integrated Child Development Services. Recognizing the importance of the first six years of a child’s life, Anganwadis provides early childhood care and nutrition, pre-school education and basic health check-ups for children, pregnant women and mothers. For many rural families, they have become one of the most reliable institutions in their lives.
But the downside is the way anganwadi workers were treated. The Centre’s share of his salary has been ₹4,500 per month since 2018; States have added surcharges, but unevenly. The government’s reluctance to recognize them as employees and not as “honorary workers” is largely due to the fact that this would require them to receive the same social security benefits to which a government employee is entitled: insurance, gratuity, pension.
In terms of the number of people it reaches, the PDS is probably the largest part of India’s social safety net – a number often estimated at nearly 80 million. But two things in particular have prevented the system from functioning smoothly in recent years and excluded many people from it. Firstly, the verification associated with Aadhaar came into play to stop fraud and check corruption and even if the intention was genuine, in practice it has resulted in many people being excluded from a right to which they were legally entitled for one reason or another.
Secondly, there is a deeper problem behind this. PDS coverage is still calculated using the 2011 census and the next census, although already underway, will take another year. The number of people who should be covered by the NFSA but are not – simply because the population data is fifteen years old – is now in the tens of millions.
Khera applies the same rigor, supported by primary and secondary data, to the mid-day meal scheme and MGNREGA, now replaced by the VB-G RAM G Act, and shows how both have worked for millions of local people.
The mid-day meal program allowed children who might otherwise have been withdrawn from school to stay in school and get a hot meal on their plates. Given the famine in India, many would otherwise have forgone it.
MGNREGA, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, mandates wage employment of at least 100 days per year for rural households. It’s more than a plan; It is a right to work. The biggest beneficiaries were women, who were often unable to work outside the home for reasons ranging from domestic duties to care work, and the law gave them real bargaining power in their own households. It put money in their hands, but it also gave them dignity.
The same NREGA, which was once called a “monument to failure” of the previous government, proved to be a lifesaver during the COVID pandemic, helping millions of households tide over the period. Over the years, the program experienced more and more budget cuts and the 100-day promise was rarely fully met – but it was still something. In December 2025, it was replaced by the Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, which increased the guarantee from 100 to 125 days while shifting a much larger share of the wage bill to the states – a 60:40 split, unlike the earlier regime under which the Center bore the entire wage bill for unskilled workers and three-fourths of the material cost, effectively funding nearly 90 per cent of the program by itself.
Pensions and public canteens have their own section in the book. Khera shows that the pension provided by the Center to many senior citizens is shocking to say the least. It stands at ₹200 per month for a BPL citizen aged 60 to 79 years and ₹500 for those above 80 years, although none of these figures have moved since 2007. What a pensioner actually receives depends almost entirely on the increase in his state. To many, public canteens may seem like an expensive item for the state coffers, but in reality they are not – and yet their budgets continue to shrink. In the states where they operate, they have helped students, working women, migrant workers and the elderly alike. It’s an idea that deserves to be scaled up and implemented across the country.
COVID-19 also comes up to show how education and health remain largely outside the country’s social safety net and how this has become evident during the pandemic. Khera draws a comparison here and shows how little India spends on health and education compared to richer countries and other developing countries.
Every welfare argument ultimately comes down to the question: Where does the money come from? Khera’s answer is not that fiscal limits are imaginary; It is that in India it is a political decision disguised as an economic fact. Because India’s direct tax base is low, the country instead strives for prosperity. The idea has more history here than it seems: The Wealth Tax Act of 1957 listed reducing inequality as one of its goals before it was repealed in 2016. The extent of this concentration also raises a more practical question: How much revenue could even a modest wealth tax at the top generate? The World Inequality Lab estimates that a 2 percent annual tax on net assets above ₹10 crore, combined with a 33 percent inheritance tax on estates above the same threshold, could generate 2.73 percent of GDP in revenue, affecting about the top 0.04 percent of adults.
Your comparisons abroad cut in the same direction. In Brazil, almost seventy percent of the population has some form of social security, whereas in India it is less than half.
She also turns to the United States – not as a direct comparison, but because most of us have an image of the United States as a neoliberal economy that would spend the least of any country on the well-being of its citizens. That turns out to be wrong: For over a decade, the United States has consistently spent more than 15 percent of its GDP on social protection, whether in the form of food stamps or Medicaid. India, on the other hand, spends around 4 percent. The point is not that India should copy America. The reason India spends so little is not economic at all.
Khera also questions whether GDP growth alone is a true measure of a country’s social well-being. Economists like Jayati Ghosh and Prabhat Patnaik have gone further, questioning the fiscal discipline argument itself and asking whether it deserves the authority it has been given. Why are only social spending being cut in the name of fiscal discipline, and why are the same standards not being applied with the same rigor to something like the renovation of Central Vista?
Khera doesn’t claim that these programs work as well as they should. Coverage is patchy, delivery uneven, and modern technocratic solutions have often done more harm than good. It argues that these failures are reasons to repair the machinery, not reasons to end the programs altogether.
What the book ultimately does is pretty simple. It dismantles three myths at once: that the Indian government spends a lot of money on these programs even though it doesn’t; that it cannot afford to spend more, even though its own comparisons clearly indicate that it can; and that these programs do not do much for the people who use them, while for many households they literally mean the difference between a child going to school and a child being taken out of school. It also warns of a more modern danger: political pressure to convert a right into a plan, because a plan, unlike a right, survives only as long as the government in power sees fit to stay alive.
And she argues with facts and figures, not just feelings.
Freebies or Rights: Understanding Social Policy in India by Reetika Khera is published by Speaking Tiger Books.
