Development, Progress and the Twenty-First Century Welfare State in India and Beyond

Public lecture by Professor Louise Tillin, King’s College London.

Welfare has become a necessary adjunct to an economic model in India that, despite growth, has not provided sustainable livelihoods and employment for a growing population. In this keynote lecture, I will draw on my new book Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2025), which traverses more than a century of welfare development from the late colonial period to the present day. I will examine why India’s model of industrialisation failed to provide an engine for mass employment or welfare state development, and why the focus of policy efforts has shifted over the last fifty years from employment generation to the rise of ‘direct benefits’ which subsidise precarious livelihoods. The competitive populist politics that have driven the expansion of such welfare schemes in recent years have sharpened a debate about whether welfare provision is best understood as a right of citizenship, as the rights-based approach to social welfare asserts, or as the unproductive diversion of scarce fiscal resources in the pursuit of short-term electoral gains. Rather than welfare serving as an integral part of India’s economic model, it is increasingly positioned as being in tension with economic policy. I will ask what we can learn about the politics of development in the twenty-first century from the past and present of welfare in India, and how India can move beyond current reductive debates to re-envision a welfare state for the future.

Bio

Louise Tillin is Professor of Politics at King’s India Institute, King’s College London. She is the author of numerous books including Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2025); Deconstructing India’s Democracy: Essays in Honour of James Manor (Orient Blackswan, 2025) edited with Rob Jenkins; The Politics of Poverty Reduction in India: The UPA Government from 2004 to 2014 (Orient Blackswan, 2020) co-authored with James Chiriyankandath, Diego Maiorano and James Manor; Indian Federalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Politics of Welfare: Comparisons across States (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited with Rajeshwari Deshpande and KK Kailash; Remapping India: New States and their Political Origins (Hurst & Co/Oxford University Press, 2013) and has published in many academic journals. She holds degrees from the University of Cambridge, the University of Pennsylvania and the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex.