Rights as freedoms, not freebies

This book opens up key debates on social policy - from mid-day meal schemes to maternity benefits and child development - and asks whether these initiatives foster dependency or empower people

Freebies or Rights: Understanding Social Policy in India

By Reetika Khera

Published by 

Speaking Tiger

408 pages ₹599

 Cash transfers and welfare perks have long served as political tools to gain votes, particularly among women. While these measures do offer some tangible relief, their public framing remains problematic. In the book Freebies or Rights, economist Reetika Khera sets out to question this framing and raises a crucial question: When the state provides essential services like food, health care, and education, are these political hand-outs or fundamental rights? Can they create more dependency or offer opportunity?

 

Through this lens, the book introduces readers to social policies and the role of the state in shaping everyday lives. It relies on primary data from field studies since the 2000s, layered with Ms Khera’s anecdotes from across rural India and secondary data. The book also draws attention to the lack of social policy departments in our central universities, which has created a vacuum in our understanding of how important it is for true nation-building.

 

The book investigates the implementation of core government programmes that offer social support to the remotest corners through food security, nutrition, public health, social protection, and employment, including during the Covid-19 pandemic. These include schemes such as maternity benefits, child development services, mid-day meals, the public distribution system, the national rural employment guarantee act, the national social assistance programme, and public canteens. Many of these schemes that existed during the United Progressive Alliance’s time and were renamed under the National Democratic Alliance have not necessarily improved. How successful have these schemes been? Has government funding and coverage increased over the last few decades? Are tech interventions as impactful as they are made out to be? How well has the funding been spent? Ms Khera examines each core policy in detail. Written in a conversational tone, her analysis, layered with plenty of data and illustrative graphs, makes complex social policy accessible and interesting even to a lay reader.

 

Among her overarching arguments is the worrying development that our social spending may not be going to the right places — and instead, be “funnelled back to corporates and philanthropic-capitalists”. She calls attention here to the flagship nutrition programme, POSHAN Abhiyaan, launched in 2018.

 

In theory, she says, it brought some useful interventions, including mass campaigns to raise awareness and support behaviour change. One of these was to encourage six months of exclusive breastfeeding for an infant. Yet from 2015-16 and 2019-21, this proportion increased only marginally from 55 to 64 per cent. This is because, she argues, a significant amount of funding was used to give smartphones to Anganwadi workers to record their work. Research suggests this perhaps hindered their work — often, these gadgets could not be used due to connectivity issues, and a software system that did not take into account the varying needs of different regions.

 

Ms Khera also draws our attention to an issue that is not adequately discussed: India’s nutrition agenda is increasingly driven by international agencies and development organisations, with a top-down approach. While corporations and philanthropist-capitalists can help with funding, “they also use it to advance their own agendas”, she says, such as their business interests and to influence government policies to suit them.

 

Another major thorn in the social policy landscape is the lack of credible data to understand the real impact of certain social policy schemes. Creating such “data blackholes”, says Ms Khera, is an “easy way to suppress failures and create fanciful narratives, or in other words, “to hide realities and avoid accountability”.

 

What is the way forward then? She cites three model states that have done better than others when it comes to implementing social policies and creating lasting impact that we could draw a few lessons from: Tamil Nadu, Odisha, and Himachal Pradesh.

 

The interventions that have worked in Odisha, for example, are simple yet effective: Including eggs not only in mid-day meals but as part of ration for children under three and pregnant and lactating mothers, ensuring pensions to elderly widows and disabled come on time every month, and maternity benefits reaching a majority — two-thirds of mothers who gave birth in 2021-22. Himachal Pradesh, meanwhile, has fared well in educational levels, with improvements in children’s reading, writing, and math skills in government schools. Additionally, the state’s efficient and extra nutritious public distribution system that goes beyond the basics is worthy of note. Tamil Nadu, too, is leaps ahead in offering reasonable meals through its system of public canteens and a breakfast scheme in schools.

 

By opening up key debates in social policy, Ms Khera brings a neglected field of study into light, offering a ripe opportunity to strengthen social protection, equality, and freedom in a way that is not framed as charity, but as basic rights.

 

The reviewer is a journalist and author