Welfare’s institutional evolution

Tillin structures her analysis chronologically across three parts, each revealing how federal arrangements shaped welfare outcomes. The book draws on extensive archival research across multiple repositories, including the National Archives of India, state archives in Maharashtra and West Bengal, and Planning Commission records.

Part One traces colonial labor regulation’s exclusive focus on industrial workers deemed economically crucial – textile mills, plantations, railways – while ignoring the agricultural majority. Tillin demonstrates how the colonial state’s selective intervention established a template wherein welfare became tied to formal employment in strategic sectors. Postindependence dirigisme extended social insurance modestly through the Employees’ State Insurance Act (1948) and the Employees’ Provident Fund (1952), but maintained the formal–informal bifurcation. The book convincingly demonstrates that this was not accidental but constitutive: welfare architecture developed symbiotically with nation-building projects, restricting protection to organized industrial workers precisely to maintain labor peace during import-substitution industrialization. Tillin shows how Planning Commission debates during the 1950s and 1960s explicitly recognized the exclusion of agricultural workers and informal sector employees but chose to prioritize industrial development, treating social insurance expansion as fiscally and administratively infeasible.

Part Two examines employment generation schemes responding to rural poverty, showing how the constitutional division of powers produced perpetual jurisdictional ambiguity wherein marginalized citizens fell through institutional cracks. The Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP) in 1978 and the Jawahar Rozgar Yojana (JRY) in 1989 emerged through political pressure following drought-induced distress, yet fiscal federalism arrangements created perverse incentives: states implemented centrally funded schemes but lacked revenue autonomy to adapt programs locally. Tillin documents how center–state negotiations repeatedly stalled over financing arrangements, implementation responsibilities, and monitoring mechanisms. Her analysis of cabinet memoranda reveals that these were not merely technical coordination problems but reflected fundamental conflicts over which level of government would bear fiscal burdens and political accountability for welfare outcomes.

Part Three analyzes how economic liberalization coexisted with welfare expansion rather than leading to retrenchment. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in 2005 and the National Food Security Act in 2013 extended means-tested support while formal sector protections stagnated. Tillin’s account of NREGA’s passage demonstrates how rights-based framing and Supreme Court intervention transformed employment generation from discretionary schemes into legal entitlements, though implementation remained contested across federal tiers. Subsequently, the Modi government repackaged existing schemes, deploying direct benefit transfers and Aadhaar biometric authentication to bypass state governments. Tillin interprets this as continuity rather than rupture, arguing that Modi’s reforms preserved the underlying architecture while centralizing administrative control.

This chronology establishes that decisions from the 1940s about coverage thresholds and administrative jurisdictions constrain possibilities in the 2020s. Tillin’s excavation reveals how technocratic Planning Commission debates masked profoundly political choices about which populations deserved protection, while her documentation of fiscal federalism illuminates persistent implementation gaps. This represents scholarship meeting Cambridge standards for empirical depth. Yet what the book explains well – how welfare architecture evolved through federal negotiations – leaves unexplained why these arrangements produce such systematic exclusion. Tillin acknowledges that welfare outcomes remain inadequate but treats this primarily as an implementation failure amenable to better coordination rather than as a structural feature serving elite interests.

Path dependence and its limits

This adoption of path dependence theory reflects a broader problem plaguing historical institutionalism: it mistakes constraint for explanation. The claim that “decisions from the 1940s constrain possibilities in the 2020s” tells us nothing about why Indian elites, when faced with mass starvation, child malnutrition, and electoral pressure, accepted those paths. The path dependence frameworks of Pierson (Reference Pierson2000) and Mahoney (Reference Mahoney2000) systematically undertheorize agency, providing a convenient analytical frame that avoids uncomfortable questions about elite choices to maintain pools of exploitable labor. If paths truly constrained outcomes so powerfully, we cannot explain why Brazil’s Bolsa Família or South Africa’s social grants systems emerged despite comparable “path dependent” obstacles of informality and federal complexity. These comparative cases suggest that path dependence operates differently depending on political mobilization, class power, and elite commitment to redistribution – variables that Tillin’s framework underemphasizes.

Consider the treatment of the Employees’ State Insurance Act (1948), analyzed by Tillin primarily through federal negotiations between the Center and Bombay Province, technical design features borrowed from British models, and bureaucratic deliberations about coverage thresholds. She meticulously documents how the Center and Bombay debated administrative control, financing mechanisms, and whether coverage should extend beyond factory workers to include smaller establishments. Yet understated are the massive textile strikes of 1946–47, Communist organizing in Bombay’s mill districts, and the threat that working-class militancy posed during a fragile postindependence moment. The 1946 Royal Indian Navy mutiny and subsequent labor unrest created conditions wherein social insurance became politically necessary for regime consolidation. Tillin acknowledges labor pressure but treats it as background context rather than the driving force. Social insurance emerged through elite fear of labor radicalism, not enlightened governance or gradual institutional evolution.

Similarly, Tillin’s treatment of NREGA emphasizes how federalism shaped implementation but downplays the mass mobilizations, hunger strikes, and Supreme Court litigation that forced reluctant governments to act. By foregrounding federal negotiations over popular mobilization, her account suggests welfare expansion occurs through elite bargaining rather than contestation from below.

Singh’s (Reference Singh2015) comparative analysis demonstrates empirically that subnational welfare variations correlate powerfully with political mobilization of subordinate groups and cultivation of inclusive regional identities. Singh’s “solidarity” framework – emphasizing collective identity forged through historical struggles – explains welfare outcomes that institutional variables alone cannot capture. Where Tillin sees institutional constraints limiting welfare expansion, Singh identifies political failures to build cross-class coalitions capable of demanding redistribution.

Missing dimensions: class, caste, and contemporary authoritarianism

By treating institutions as explanatory variables rather than outcomes requiring explanation, Tillin misses how welfare architecture systematically privileges organized industrial workers while abandoning agricultural laborers, construction workers, and domestic workers – precisely those populations lacking political organization and upper-caste representation in decision-making forums. Institutions crystallize particular power distributions resulting from historical conflicts, and the book’s failure to center these conflicts leaves unexplained why India’s welfare arrangements maintain such systematic exclusion for the vast majority. The formal–informal bifurcation that Tillin documents so meticulously is not merely an institutional legacy but an ongoing political choice serving capital accumulation by maintaining cheap, disposable labor.

This analytical limitation becomes most acute around contemporary authoritarianism. Tillin’s conclusion addresses Modi government welfare politics primarily through continuity: despite BJP rhetoric promising to end “entitlement culture,” the underlying architecture remained stable, with Modi repackaging rather than transforming existing programs. This fundamentally misreads the rupture scholars across the ideological spectrum now recognize. Since 2014, GST restructuring has aggressively undermined fiscal federalism by centralizing revenue collection and reducing states’ fiscal autonomy, Aadhaar biometric authentication has systematically excluded millions from welfare entitlements, and social spending has declined relative to GDP despite expanding program rhetoric. Khera’s (Reference Khera2017) research demonstrates that mandatory biometric authentication functions as an exclusion tool: authentication failures – common among elderly workers with worn fingerprints, manual laborers, and women without personal mobile phones – result in denial of legal entitlements. What the government terms “savings” from eliminating “ghosts and duplicates” actually represents the exclusion of eligible citizens. Between 2016 and 2019, an estimated 10–15% of entitled beneficiaries faced exclusion due to Aadhaar authentication failures, translating into millions denied rations, pensions, and employment wages.

Jaffrelot’s (Reference Jaffrelot2021) documentation of welfare’s weaponization for Hindu majoritarian mobilization reveals not policy failure but a deliberate strategy wherein welfare becomes a tool for building authoritarian populism rather than reducing deprivation. This “techno-patrimonialism” fundamentally alters welfare’s political meaning even while preserving institutional structures – a transformation that Tillin’s continuity thesis cannot adequately capture.

The book’s insufficient engagement with informality – despite 90% of Indian workers laboring without formal contracts or welfare coverage – constitutes a significant limitation. Tillin documents the formal–informal bifurcation but does not interrogate why India’s formal sector has remained so stubbornly small despite seven decades of development. The absence of sustained attention to informality’s gendered and caste dimensions, wherein women, Dalits, and Adivasis catastrophically overrepresent in precarious employment, weakens the analysis of why welfare architecture systematically excludes the majority. These are not incidental gaps but constitutive features of a welfare regime designed around upper-caste male industrial workers.

Moreover, Tillin’s analysis largely sidesteps fiscal political economy. The book focuses on expenditure patterns and intergovernmental fiscal transfers but does not examine why Indian elites with demonstrable capacity to fund infrastructure, military modernization, and corporate subsidies systematically refuse to tax wealth for social protection.