India needs new livelihood architecture, not more schemes: Report

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India’s subsidies and handouts that were started during Covid, while politically necessary and socially vital during the crises, have become structurally embedded without commensurate investment in productivity infrastructure, enterprise ecosystems or skill-to-employment pathways, the latest edition of Access Development Services’s State of India's Livelihood Report 2025 said.

 

The report, which is divided into more than 10 chapters written by eminent academicians, economists and others, in one of the sections said that evidence from 2023–25 confirms that India’s livelihood policy framework has not yet resolved its foundational tension between protection and promotion.

 

The report will be released on December 3.

 

The chapter titled Policy and Programme Response to Revive Livelihoods, 2023–2025: From Recovery to Resilience?, written by Ramesh Srivatsava Arunachalam, said that PM-KISAN transfers eroded to covering only eight per cent of marginal farmer cultivation costs, yet were not complemented by investments in irrigation efficiency, post-harvest infrastructure or market access that could multiply returns.

 

MGNREGS person-days declined even as climate shocks intensified, and only 12 per cent of workers directly improved agricultural productivity despite 73 per cent of workers depending on agriculture.

 

It said between 2023 and 2025, women received 69 per cent of Mudra loans totalling Rs 2.89 lakh crore, but 43 per cent went to consumption or debt repayment rather than enterprise creation, and women-led enterprises earned only one-third of male-led counterparts, signalling access without ecosystem support.

 

FPO registrations reached 8,875, but only 31 per cent achieved viability, 73 per cent lacked professional management, and just 24 per cent secured output market linkages.

 

“The pattern is consistent across schemes: programmes deliver benefits but do not build the institutional, technical and market architecture required for sustained income growth,” the chapter said.

 

The focus remains on distributing resources rather than transforming production relations, on cushioning vulnerability rather than constructing resilience, and on counting beneficiaries rather than tracking productivity gains or enterprise survival rates, it added.

 

The chapter said that this subsidy–productivity imbalance intersects with a climate deficit that threatens to unravel gains.

 

Climate resilience, despite being the defining challenge of the next decade, has not been mainstreamed into livelihood design.

 

India experienced extreme weather on 255 of 274 days in the first nine months of 2024, yet livelihood schemes operated without integrated climate risk assessments, adaptive asset standards or automatic triggers linking weather events to benefit expansions.

 

On agriculture, the author said that agricultural policies promoted input subsidies over water-efficient crops, insurance design left small losses uncompensated and urban informal workers received no workplace adaptation support despite documented heat-related productivity collapse.

 

It said the way forward is not more schemes but a new architecture with five non-negotiables: pathway integration that merges floors and ladders; inclusive delivery rails pairing DBT with assisted access and rigorous evaluation; climate-ready design as a first-mile requirement; productivity-centred inclusion that focuses on survivability and scale for women, SC/ST, migrants and lagging regions; and adaptive institutions with automatic stabilisers, evaluation-to-policy loops and a national diffusion platform.

             

“If these reforms are embraced, India’s livelihood system will no longer function as permanent relief punctuated by episodic upgrades, but instead as a framework of compounded mobility underpinned by resilience,” the report added.

 

A chapter on agriculture titled Farmers and Consumers in Competition, written by Siraj Hussain and others, said that the government’s efforts to keep food prices low have adversely affected the livelihoods of nearly 47 per cent of the Indian population that depends on agriculture.

 

As a result, the burden of keeping food inflation low has often fallen on farmers, producers and the workforce dependent on agriculture, even as they battle nature, with climate change a tangible presence in crop production systems.