India's states are starving education to feed freebies. It will hurt

Far from empowering the poor, the proliferation of freebies could have the opposite effect, harming social and economic outcomes

In Indian fiscal federalism, states have the predominant responsibility for providing social services and share co-equal responsibility, along with the Union government, for economic services. Yet, when it comes to evaluating their fiscal performance, the focus invariably remains on their deficits and debt, and not on the quality of their public spending. In reality, the recent trends see a sharp deterioration in the quality of public spending as subsidies and transfers crowd out expenditures on empowering people and accelerating development.  Every political party promises more and more “freebies” for short-term electoral gains, thereby compressing expenditures on physical and