India runs one of the largest social welfare networks in the world and increasingly talks about it, at least in its political discourse, as if it were something to be embarrassed about. The shift in language has been more prominent over the last decade or so, and programmes that for some time were moving towards being seen as rights are now spoken of as “freebies” handed down by the government.

One reason for this could be that the purpose and use of these programmes have changed — they are increasingly seen as a political tool rather than something a government owes its citizens. The rhetoric isn’t only 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 India’s social welfare architecture 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 herself, is to introduce this architecture to the Indian public so that, away from the noise, readers can see for themselves why these programmes were introduced in the first place, how they’ve performed against their goals, and whether they’re worth continuing and supporting.

Image via IIT Delhi

She does this by going through seven programmes that make up the largest share of India’s social security net, accompanying a citizen from cradle to grave.

Maternity benefit is a good place to start; on paper it’s one of the more progressive policies of its kind anywhere, guaranteeing a woman 26 weeks of paid maternity leave. One catch is that this policy, under the Maternity Benefit Act of 1961, amended in 2017, covers only women in the organised sector and close to 93 per cent of the Indian workforce is informal, entirely outside its purview. The scheme meant to cover that 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. Set against 26 weeks of paid leave in the formal sector, the difference is stark. But it is still a measure of support, and in some states, additional top-ups go some way towards giving pregnant women greater financial security.

India has improved significantly over the years, even though it still has a long way to go on malnutrition, stunting and wasting among children. One of the main reasons for that improvement has been the work of Anganwadis, operated under the Integrated Child Development Services. Recognising how crucial the first six years of a child’s life are, Anganwadis provide 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 dependable institutions in their lives.

But the flip side is the way Anganwadi workers have been treated. The Centre’s share of their pay has sat at ₹4,500 a month since 2018; states have added top-ups, but unevenly. The government’s reluctance to recognise them as employees, rather than “honorary” workers, comes down largely to this: doing so would require extending to them the same social security benefits a government employee is entitled to: insurance, gratuity, pension.

The PDS is probably the single largest part of India’s social safety net in terms of the number of people it reaches — a figure often put at close to 80 crore. But two things in particular have kept the system from functioning smoothly in recent years, excluding many people along the way. First, Aadhaar-linked verification came in to stop fraud and check corruption, and even where the intent was genuine, it has, in practice, left many people excluded from a right they were legally entitled to, for one reason or another.

Second, there’s a deeper problem underneath. PDS coverage is still calculated off the 2011 Census, and the next one, though underway, will take another year to complete. In the meantime, the number of people who should be covered under the NFSA but aren’t — purely because the population data is fifteen years old — runs into the tens of millions.

Khera brings the same rigour, backed by primary and secondary data, to the mid-day meal scheme and MGNREGA, now replaced by the VB-G RAM G Act, showing how both have worked for millions on the ground.

The mid-day meal scheme has kept children in school who might otherwise have been pulled out, and put a hot meal on their plates. Given India’s hunger numbers, many would otherwise have gone without one.

MGNREGA, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, mandated at least 100 days of wage employment a year for rural households. It’s more than a scheme; it’s a right to work. Its largest beneficiaries have been women who, for reasons ranging from domestic duties to care work, have often been unable to work outside the home, and the Act has given them real bargaining power within their own households. It has put money in their hands, but it has given them dignity too.

The same NREGA once called a “monument to the failure” of the previous government turned out to be a lifesaver during the COVID pandemic, helping millions of households tide over that period. Over the years, the scheme saw more and more budget cuts, and the promise of 100 days was rarely fully met — but it was something, nonetheless. In December 2025, it was replaced by the Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, raising the guarantee from 100 to 125 days while shifting a much larger share of the wage bill onto states — a 60:40 split, against the earlier arrangement, under which the Centre bore the full unskilled wage bill and three-fourths of material costs, effectively funding close to 90 per cent of the scheme on its own.

Pensions and public canteens get their own section in the book. Khera shows, for many elderly citizens, the pension the Centre provides is shocking, to say the least, capped at ₹200 a month for a BPL citizen aged 60 to 79, and ₹500 for those past 80, neither figure having moved since 2007. What a pensioner actually gets now depends almost entirely on their state’s own top-up. Public canteens might seem, to many, like an expensive line for the state exchequer, but in reality they’re not — and yet their budgets keep shrinking regardless. In the states where they function, they’ve helped students, working women, migrant workers and the elderly alike. It’s an idea that deserves to be scaled up and implemented nationally.

COVID-19 comes up too, to show how education and health remain largely outside the country’s social safety net, and how starkly that was exposed during the pandemic. Khera draws a comparison here, showing how little India spends on health and education compared with richer countries and other developing countries.

Every welfare argument eventually runs into this question: where does the money come from? Khera’s answer isn’t that fiscal limits are imaginary; it’s that where India draws them is a political decision dressed up as an economic fact. India’s direct-tax base is narrow, so she looks towards wealth instead. The idea has more history here than it might seem: the Wealth Tax Act of 1957 named reducing inequality as one of its goals before being scrapped in 2016. The scale of that concentration also raises a more practical question: how much revenue could even a modest tax on wealth at the very top generate? The World Inequality Lab estimates that a 2 per cent annual tax on net wealth above ₹10 crore, combined with a 33 per cent inheritance tax on estates above the same threshold, could generate 2.73 per cent of GDP in revenue, affecting roughly the top 0.04 per cent of adults.

Her comparisons abroad cut the same way. Brazil covers close to seventy per cent of its population under some form of social security, against under half in India. 

She also turns to the United States — not as a direct comparison, but because the image most of us carry of the US is of a neo-liberal economy that, of all countries, would spend the least on its citizens’ welfare. That turns out to be wrong: for over a decade now, the US has consistently spent more than 15 per cent of its GDP on social protection, whether through food stamps or Medicaid. India, by contrast, spends roughly 4 per cent. The point isn’t that India should copy America. It’s that the reasons India gives for spending so little aren’t really economic at all.

Khera also asks whether GDP growth, on its own, is any real measure of a country’s social wellbeing. Economists like Jayati Ghosh and Prabhat Patnaik have gone further, questioning the fiscal-discipline argument itself, and whether it deserves the authority it’s been granted. Why is it only welfare spending that gets cut in the name of fiscal discipline, and why aren’t the same standards applied with equal rigour to something like the Central Vista redevelopment?

Khera doesn’t pretend these programmes work as well as they should. Coverage is patchy, delivery is uneven, and modern technocratic fixes have often done more harm than good. Her case is that these failures are reasons to fix the machinery, not reasons to kill the programmes altogether.

What the book does, in the end, is fairly simple. It takes apart three myths at once: that the Indian government spends lavishly on these programmes when it doesn’t; that it can’t afford to spend more when, by its own comparisons, it clearly can; and that these programmes don’t do much for the people who use them, when for many households they’re literally the difference between a child going to school and a child being pulled out of it. Alongside that, it warns of a more modern danger: the political pressure to turn a right into a scheme, because a scheme, unlike a right, only survives for as long as whichever government is in power finds it convenient to keep alive.

And she makes this case with facts and figures, not sentiment alone.

‘Freebies or Rights: Understanding Social Policy in India’ by Reetika Khera is published by Speaking Tiger Books.