Description
Welfare politics take centre stage in India's electoral landscape today. Direct benefits and employment generation form the mainstays of social provision, while most citizens lack dependable rights to sickness leave, pensions, maternity benefits or unemployment insurance. But how did this system evolve? Louise Tillin traces the origins and development of India's welfare regime, recovering a history previously relegated to the margins of scholarship on the political economy of development. Her deeply researched analysis, spanning from the early twentieth century to the present, captures long-term patterns of continuity and change against a backdrop of nation-building, economic change, and democratisation. Making India Work demonstrates that while patronage and resource constraints have undermined the provision of public goods, Indian workers, employers, politicians and bureaucrats have long debated what an Indian 'welfare state' should look like. The ideas and principles shaping earlier policies remain influential today.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: the shaping of a welfare regime; 2. Origins, expansion and reform: India's welfare regime in historical perspective; Part I. Building a National Economy: Regulating Internal Competition: 3. In the shadow of sickness: Bombay and the origins of social insurance; 4. World war two, Tripartism and a National welfare State for industrial workers; Part II. Putting India to Work: 5. A girding of loins: planning and the duty to work in the postcolonial State; 6. Electoral competition and the expansion of social policy to rural areas: rural employment guarantee as social security; Part III. Liberalisation and Welfare in a Multi-level Democracy: 7. Liberalisation and the 'social safety net'; 8. Welfare, rights and the market in the post-congress polity, 1998-2014; 9. Conclusion: the past and future of the welfare State in India; Bibliography; Index.
