DEST Practice 12

Social sector spending by the Indian government encompasses a vast range of programmes and interventions in education, health, nutrition, social protection, housing, rural development, urban poverty alleviation, and minority welfare that collectively aim to improve the quality of life of the poor and vulnerable sections of the population and provide them with the capabilities, services, and opportunities needed to participate in the mainstream of economic and social life. India's transition from a predominantly supply-side approach to social welfare, in which government agencies delivered standardised services through their own infrastructure and staff, to a more demand-side approach in which cash transfers, vouchers, and individual entitlements give beneficiaries greater choice and agency in accessing services, has been one of the defining policy shifts of the past decade. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which guarantees one hundred days of paid work per year to every rural household, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana providing housing assistance to the homeless and poorly housed, the National Social Assistance Programme providing pensions to elderly, widows, and disabled persons from below poverty line families, the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana providing cooking gas connections to women from poor households, and the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana providing universal access to banking services are among the flagship social protection interventions that have reached crores of beneficiaries. The Scheduled Caste Sub-Plan and the Tribal Sub-Plan, now renamed the Scheduled Caste Component and the Tribal Component, mandate that a proportion of plan funds at least equal to their share in the national population be allocated for the benefit of scheduled caste and scheduled tribe populations respectively, ensuring that historically marginalised communities receive a proportionate share of developmental investment. The Aspirational Districts Programme, subsequently expanded as the Aspirational Districts and Blocks Programme, identified the most backward districts and blocks in the country by their performance on health and nutrition, education, agriculture and water resources, financial inclusion, and infrastructure indicators, and focused convergent government attention and resources on accelerating their development to at least average national levels. The direct benefit transfer reform, under which cash subsidies and programme benefits are transferred directly into the bank accounts of verified beneficiaries through the Aadhaar-linked payment infrastructure, has substantially reduced leakage, ghost beneficiaries, and administrative overhead in welfare programme delivery, with the government estimating savings of several lakh crore rupees over the years of its implementation. NITI Aayog's Composite Water Management Index, Health Index, School Education Quality Index, and State Energy and Climate Index provide competitive benchmarking tools that rank states and districts on key development indicators, creating incentives for state governments to perform better and facilitating the sharing of best practices. Poverty alleviation, measured by the official multidimensional poverty index that covers health, education, and standard of living dimensions, has shown significant improvement in recent years, with India achieving the target of halving the proportion of people in multidimensional poverty ahead of schedule.