Let them eat slogans

Any assessment of Modi government’s two years in power will be incomplete without examining its performance on the social welfare front. This is because the popular mandate for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was based on its promise of ‘achhe din’ and ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’. Since then, there has been a lot of talk by policymakers about ensuring inclusion. Despite all this talk, evidence generally points to intensification of inequalities and lack of inclusion in terms of most important social and economic outcomes. Significant sections of the population are consistently and often extremely deprived of access to public goods that are essential for a human life with dignity.

At the end of two years, what are the contours and consequences of the Modi government’s approach to welfare? Trends reveal cross-cutting tendencies. Social sector schemes haven’t disappeared. The Finance Minister in his 2016 Budget speech claimed that the Modi government was committed to social sector expansion and that it was a major priority of the government. Data analysis, however, shows allocations to most social sector programmes fell short and failed to address the core concerns in health, education, civic amenities etc. Compared even to 2014-15, there has been a decline in the 2016-17 Budget in the share of GDP going to health, primary education, midday meals, and Integrated Child Development Services. At a broader level, the Budgets of 2015 and 2016 offer very little by way of vision for social policy in India.

The parliamentary rout of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the 2014 general elections had led many commentators to speculate about the future of the rights-based welfare acts passed by the UPA government for the furtherance of the social sector. There is no frontal attack on rights-based welfare schemes, but the truth is their continuation notwithstanding, there is a pattern of dilution by stealth. Nowhere is this more evident than in the government’s treatment of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). The attitude has been largely dismissive of the welfare regime enacted by the previous government. Prime Minister Narendra Modi derided it as a monument to 60 years of failure of the previous government. Despite its vehement denials, there are indications that the government is not keen on the rural jobs scheme and is sometimes quite unmindful of its legal obligations under it. It had attempted several dilutions as soon as it took office — restricting it to the poorest districts, reducing the wage component, introducing greater rigidity in the type of works that could be taken up. 

As a result, instead of expanding, the scale of MGNREGA works is well below what is required and wages often remain unpaid for months despite agrarian distress and the enormous suffering of the rural poor in large parts of India’s countryside for the past two to three years. Even more seriously, the central and state governments are doing far too little to implement the National Food Security Act (NFSA), three years after it came into force. Had the NFSA been in place, more than 80 per cent of rural households in the poorer states would be able to secure about half of their monthly cereal requirements almost free of cost. Even though these two schemes are insufficient, they can provide minimum relief in terms of income and food to the most vulnerable and marginalised.

Dismantling important safeguards in the Land Acquisition Act such as the consent clause and social assessment impact through an Ordinance (which was eventually withdrawn in the face of huge opposition from farmers) is in keeping with the generally conservative attitude to labour and to workers (both paid and unpaid) that seems to characterise this government. The regressive attitude to labour is exemplified in the decision of the Union Cabinet to amend the Child Labour Prohibition and Regulation Act 1986 so as to allow children to help the family in fields, home based work and forests before and after school hours and during vacations. This effectively legalises the exploitation of children through work, even while rendering it invisible because of its control by the household. Additionally, allowing children below 14 years to work undermines the Right to Education (RTE) Act and all efforts to improve education among the marginalized children.

Historically, successive governments in the Centre and the states have unveiled a range of social welfare initiatives in the sphere of human development. However, the BJP government is not known for its social sector policies or its take on a social welfare regime. There is no urgency or a sense of a framework for dealing with the important challenge of establishing a welfare state in a country with high levels of mass deprivation. The present government doesn’t have a social welfare policy beyond catchy slogans such as Swachh Bharat, Smart Cities, Start up India, Stand up India and so on. That the government does not have a blueprint for social policy is further evident from the assortment of schemes included in the Finance Ministry 2016 post-budget flyer. These range from schemes like the LPG connection, the health insurance programme, Stand Up India, and the Jan Annusuddhi Yojana. But none of these add up to a coherent storyline for social policy in India. 

Moreover, it’s worth noting that most of these policies have come from above, in point of fact from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). There is almost no civil society consultation or participation in the policymaking process.

Civil society space to function independently to highlight the concerns of the marginalised sections with regard to the impact of current policies and provisions is shrinking in view of the distrust of civil society and NGOs, and the concomitant political and administrative impediments which seek to curtail their activities. There is another distinct feature of some of these schemes which is that they demand investment not from the state, but often from proposed beneficiaries. The latest is Start up, Stand up India. The initiative is aimed at promoting entrepreneurship among the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and women, by facilitating loans in the range of Rs10-100 lakh. Each branch of a scheduled commercial bank shall facilitate at least two such loans and Dalit entrepreneurs who are expected to generate jobs under this scheme. Contributory social insurances schemes are another example of this approach. The presumption that the poor should contribute to the betterment of their lives, or of that of their families after death, is both implausible and unrealistic. They have to be protected against the exigencies of poverty and deprivation, and not only against unforeseen hazards or disasters. 

India’s poor have been short-changed by the way the social welfare programmes are being restructured by the present dispensation. The socio-economic impact of the current government’s approach and decisions on the welfare front is becoming apparent: the unmaking of the developmental state and modest allocations to social sector programmes which in the long run undermine the prospect of building human capabilities necessary for a human life of dignity.

The author is Professor Emerita, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University