An excerpt from Realising Rights: A Handbook of Welfare in India
In the 2000s, the character of the welfare regime began to change. From 2004 onwards, major social policies reflected a significant shift towards the language of rights (Chopra 2014). A series of rights-based laws, such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in 2005, the Forest Rights Act in 2006, the Right to Education Act in 2009 and the National Food Security Act (NFSA) in 2013, were passed. Beyond legislation, major programmatic initiatives were under-taken. Such as the National Rural Health Mission in 2005, the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in Education, in addition to the expansion of the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) alongside substantial reforms to the PDS in several states with a renewed focus on nutrition as a whole. Mechanisms of accountability came into mainstream use “via” the Right to Information Act (2005), social audits, independent commissions and grievance redress systems. (Adhikari and Heller 2024). These programmes were usually associated with building local institutional capacity through schools, anganwadis, health centres, ration shops, work sites and so on.Community monitoring was formalised through local school education committees, anganwadi mothers’ committees, vigilance committees for ration shops, and village health, sanitation and nutrition committees.
Most of these interventions aimed to achieve clear welfare objectives, such as sending children to school, improving child nutrition, enhancing access to health- care and guaranteeing employment at minimum wages, while protecting basic rights to education, health, nutrition, work and social protection. Decentralisation was built into programme design. In summary, attempts were made to create institutions or strengthen existing ones, to ensure that the socio-economic rights of individuals were honoured. Drawing upon the DPSP, these interventions began to show results.
From entitlements to transfers: When rights holders turned beneficiaries
Over the last decade (since 2015), the welfare space has undergone a reconfiguration. Shifting away from the rights-based approach to Direct Benefit Transfers (DBTs) and centralised flagship schemes. The older initiatives continue, albeit under changed names and with modified approaches. For instance, under the NFSA 2013, two-thirds of the population are legally entitled to foodgrains at highly subsidised rates. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, this has been altered through the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY), under which foodgrains are distributed free of cost. The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan of the 2000s is now the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan, the ICDS is now Saksham Anganwadi, and the school mid-day meal programme is now PM POSHAN. Along with the change in nomenclature, the Centre-state relationship in welfare is also changing, as responsibility for delivery has increasingly moved to states through the restructuring of centrally sponsored schemes, changes in the revenue-sharing framework following the GST transition, and reduced central contributions to scheme funding (see Figure 1.1).
Some pro- grammes have undergone significant changes to the cost-sharing norms, from either being fully centrally sponsored or based on 75:25 Centre–state contributions, to a revised system of 60:40 contributions. The most recent example of such altering rights-based welfare is the repeal of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) under which the Centre was responsible for 100 per cent of the labour costs and its replacement with the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission, Grameen Act (VB-GRAM-G Act), wherein states have to contribute to 40 per cent of the wages.. States are thus expected to spend more of their own resources on programmes. The Union government’s share of total social sector expenditure has declined from a high of about 25 per cent in 2009 to around 10–14 per cent in the last decade. Furthermore, the share of social sector expenditure in total Union government expenditure has declined from around 22 per cent in the early 2010s to less than 20 per cent from 2022 onwards, indicating a declining priority to the social sectors in the union budget. (Figure 1.2).
Since 2015, there has been a simultaneous change in the design and mode of welfare provisioning. One observes the emergence of ‘New Welfarism’, in which there is a preference for subsidised public provisioning of tangible goods and services over the provision of intangible public goods such as quality healthcare and education. It is argued that New Welfarism may be favoured over traditional redistribution because it is seen to offer greater electoral opportunities (Anand, Dimble and Subramanian 2020). As a result, in some domains there has been a visible expansion of several flagship schemes: housing under PM Awas Yojana, toilets under Swachh Bharat, LPG connections under Ujjwala Yojana and cash transfers to farmers through PM KISAN. It has been argued that this shift substantially changes the nature of the citizen–state relationship, making people dependent on the whims of the state (Khera 2025). Furthermore, these transfers are seen as compensatory in nature, making up for the failure to create employment and ensure decent wages (Hasan 2025; Bhattacharya 2026).
The emergence of digital governance and the expansion of the JAM trinity (Jan Dhan–Aadhaar–Mobile) have, in part, facilitated this transition to New Welfarism by creating the ecosystem for DBT and introducing a technological layer between citizens and the state. In doing so, they have become both a platform and a governance philosophy. The linking of entitlements to digital identities was under-taken in the hope of delivering welfare more effectively by limiting leakages.
Figure 1.1: Union government share in total social sector expenditure
Sources and notes: RBI Database.
Figure 1.2: Social sector expenditure as a % of Union budget
The Union government currently implements 324 DBT schemes across fifty-six ministries. Such schemes, particularly unconditional cash transfers in the name of women, have now made an entry into state programmes. About seventeen states currently have such a transfer programme, with many political parties promising some form of cash transfer during election campaigns.
There are important positives associated with digital governance. In line with Section 4 of the Right to Information Act, which mandates proactive disclosure of information, most welfare programmes are now accompanied by a public-facing, web-based management information system. This has made public scrutiny possible. For the state, transfers of funds accompanied by a digital trail have become quicker, administrative overheads have been reduced and dashboards provide a quick reference to key metrics of programme functioning. Increased penetration of bank accounts has improved last-mile access. Faster registration of grievances and quicker resolution are promising aspects of digital governance. However, these positives need to be balanced with some notes of caution, as many chapters in this Handbook highlight. Veeraraghavan (2021) observes three key features of digital governance: ‘top-down, iterative and detail-oriented.’ This has meant that field-level bureaucrats are often neither privy to technological changes nor adequately trained to adapt to centralised digital architecture and its updates. The lack of clear protocols further exacerbates this problem, and the onus of compliance across digital platforms often falls on the rural poor, resulting in new forms of exclusion (Buddha and Tamang 2023; Drèze 2025). Moreover, digital infrastructures evolve much faster than uneven rural infrastructures can keep pace with, resulting in violations of rights (Nair 2026).
The rapidly evolving modes of delivery and changing welfare regime are altering some of the core objectives of rights-based legislation. These Acts came with legal entitlements, accountability mechanisms and grievance redress systems that gave citizens formal recourse when entitlements were not delivered. The new cash transfers largely do not. New Welfarism and DBTs provide easily measurable inputs and outcomes. Important as they are, building local institutional capacity, improving accountability and enabling individuals to make claims have been rendered secondary. Some scholars argue that this shift in the governance mindset, from inputs and processes to outputs and outcomes, has hindered the everyday practice of citizenship, making the state distant, opaque and less accountable (Falcao 2024; Chaudhuri 2020; Dhorajiwala 2020). A rights-based welfare regime implies that emphasis must be placed not only on what the state achieves (outputs and outcomes) but also on how it achieves it (inputs and processes).
(Dipa Sinha is a development economist interested in issues related to economic and social policy in India and works at Centre for the Study of the Indian Economy, Azim Premji University. Rajendran Narayanan is an Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences at Azim Premji University. The excerpt is from Realising Rights – A Handbook of Welfare in India, Centre for the Study of the Indian Economy. (Ed.)., Azim Premji University, 2026. The handbook can be downloaded from https://publications.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/7627/1/CSIE%20Welfare%20Handbook_3July.pdf )
