CHALLENGES TO ROBUST WELFARE IN INDIA
The emergence of India as a Welfare State:
India is seventy-three years old now when it comes to freedom. It has been a free state since 15th August 1947 and has declared itself a republic since 26th January 1950. India is an ancient land with emergence as a nation in the modern sense. India became a democratic, sovereign country once the constitution came into effect post-1950. The transition of India from a British colony to a sovereign state has been revolutionary. The conceptualization of the idea of freedom started around the 1930s with the actual realization happening in 1950. This entire journey led to the birth of the Indian Republic state.
The idea of the welfare state in India came into the political realm where the national leaders of the colonial rule envisaged a welfare state which strived for the well-being of the citizens of the nation. The entire freedom struggle of the nation was brought to a focus on articulating the well-being of the people. A welfare state is a concept of government where the state plays an integral role in the protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens. The welfare state in India is the development of the twentieth century that grew in closeness with contemporary political ideology from the west. This entire Indian national movement and the Constitution of India laid the foundation for an interventionist state in India.
Before comprehending the challenges to robust welfare in India, it is significant to understand what welfare means.
According to Greve, “Welfare is the highest possible access to economic resources, a high level of well-being, including the happiness of the citizens, a guaranteed minimum income to avoid living in poverty, and, finally, having the capabilities to ensure an individual a good life”.
Welfare in India is based on the elements of equality in opportunities, equitable distribution of wealth, and a combination of democracy, welfare, capitalism, and socialism. The welfare state in India provides education, housing, healthcare, pensions, insurances for unemployment, sick leave, equal wages through price, and wage controls. Along with that, it also provides for public transportation, childcare, and social amenities like libraries, parks, public toilets, and many other such essential amenities. Most of these programs are paid via the taxes paid by the citizens of the country.
In the next section, we will be elaborating more on why we need welfare concerning the Indian context.
Need for Welfare in the Indian Context:
India has always been known for its rich culture and heritage. It is indeed a melting pot of diversities. It is the world’s largest democracy and is the second most populated country in the world. According to the 2011 government census, more than 50% of India’s population is below the age of 25 and more than 65% below the age of 35 and yet as of 2020, the youth unemployment rate of India is at a peaking 22.85%. India has 16.45 crore children in the age group of 0–6 years and 37.24 crores in the age group of 0–14 years of age which constitutes 13.59% and 30.76 % of the total population of the country and yet NFHS (National Family Health Survey) 2015–16 data shows that 38% of the under-five child population of India are stunted and 36% of the under-five child population of the country are underweight. India needs welfare to maintain equality in opportunities among its citizens irrespective of caste, creed, gender, sex, religion, race, tribes, etc., equitable distribution of wealth among its citizens, sturdy social protection and security model for all vulnerable sections of the society and more important a just society with peace and harmony.
In the next section, we will discuss the challenges to a robust welfare system in India concerning various schemes and policies and some real-life examples.
Challenges to Robust Welfare in India:
Integrated Child Development Services, 1975-
The Integrated Child Development Scheme launched in the year 1975, is the flagship program of the government of India which provides supplementary nutrition, immunization, and pre-school education to the children with a holistic development approach. This is a centrally sponsored scheme that is implemented by the state and the union territory governments. The key objectives of this scheme are:
- Improving the health and nutritional status of children within the age group of 0–6 years.
- Laying foundation for proper psychological, social, and physical development of every child.
- Reducing the mortality, morbidity, malnutrition and school dropouts pan India.
- Enhancing the capability of the mothers to look after their health and the nutritional needs of the child through proper nutrition and health education.
- Achieving effective coordination among various government departments to promote child development.
Another key part of this scheme is the Anganwadi system. An Anganwadi is a type of child care center in India. Currently, there are more than 13.77 lakh Anganwadi centers that are operational in India. An Anganwadi worker’s role is to organize and provide supplementary nutrition for children, pregnant women, and nourishing mothers. They are to educate the mothers to look after the normal nutrition needs of their children.
I was interning at the Guwahati regional office of the National Institute of Public Corporation and Child Development (NIPCCD) for two months. NIPCCD is a premier and nodal institution for empowering and training the functionaries of the Integrated Child Development Scheme. Part of my job profile was to monitor the Anganwadi centers in the rural areas of the Kamrup Metro district of Assam. While monitoring, I realized that most of the centers lack basic facilities and the Anganwadi worker are highly overworked and underpaid with an average salary of Rs. 2250-Rs. 3500 per month. Most of the problems faced by Anganwadi workers in Guwahati were to their satisfaction with their minimum needs and expectation from the work. Some of the major problems faced by the Anganwadi workers are male dominance, restrictions imposed by their families, lack of security, inflexible working hours, low salary, and physical as well as mental constraints. This brings out lacuna and a gap within the welfare of the children of the country through this scheme.
National Rural Health Mission, 2005-
The National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) was launched in the year 2005 to provide accessible, affordable, and quality healthcare to the rural population with special attention to vulnerable groups. The National Rural Health Mission focusses on reducing Infant Mortality Rate, Maternal Mortality Rate, universal access to healthcare, proper sanitation and hygiene and prevention and control of communicable and non-communicable diseases.
Recently, I had worked with an organization called The Action Northeast Trust located in Chirang District of Assam. I was predominantly working with the Bodo tribe concerning their quality of life and how it can be improved. While doing this research study, I had conducted an in-depth interview with an ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) worker. An ASHA worker is a trained female community health activist under the NRHM scheme. Their tasks include motivating the women of the community to give birth in hospitals, making sure that all the children of the community are immunized, encouraging family planning, treating basic injuries with first aid, documenting demographic records of the community, and improving village sanitation. ASHAs are meant to be the bridging gap between the public health care system and the citizens.
While interviewing the ASHA worker from Chirang, it was evident that she found difficulty in getting incentives for work and the population catered by her was too high, hence she felt overburdened. Another major challenge at a health system level was the disrespect shown to her by hospital staff and lack of essential medicines and pregnancy testing kits due to which, she even lost credibility among few members of the community and affected her work performance. The main bridging gap between health care services and people of the community is the ASHA workers and yet they are not treated like the way should be. They are underpaid and overworked.
Pre Matric Scholarship Scheme for ST Students (Class IX & X), 2006-
Article 46 of Part IV of the Indian Constitution promotes the educational and economic interests of the weaker sections of the society, in particular of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The main objective of this scheme is to support the parents of ST children studying in classes IX and X of the pre-matric stage economically through a scholarship so that the incidence of drop-out minimizes and to improve participation of ST children in educational activities.
This was in the year 2018 when I was working with a tribe in Dakshin Karnataka, South India called the Koraga tribe. They are a tribe of basket-makers and laborers, some of whom are even employed as scavengers. Even today, in this modern world, they remain among the untouchables and are being considered as ritually polluted by the so-called upper-caste Hindus. The Koraga people have always been subjugated in the society and have been subjected to a practice known as Ajalu where people from the Koraga community are treated differently than people belonging to other communities and treat them as inferior humans, mixing hair, nails and other obnoxious substances in their food and making them eat that. This is a very inhuman act and has been prohibited by the government of Karnataka in the year 2000. Nonetheless, Ajalu is still occasionally witnessed during temple fairs, etc.
When I was working with the tribe, I was teaching at a local school in the Udupi district of Karnataka in areas where predominantly, the Koragas used to live. There was a child who hadn’t received the pre-matric scholarship. So, I took all the required documents and went to the Integrated Tribal Development Office at Udupi with the child with me. When I told one of the officials that I am working for the Koraga tribe and this child here hasn’t received her Pre-Matric scholarship yet. They looked down upon me and the child and said “Madam, please don’t bring people from the Koraga community into our office. We will look into the matter and make sure that the children get the scholarship. It’s government work. We don’t have funds yet”. Those words are still ingrained into my mind. It was so heart wrenching to go through that form of discrimination for me. Now imagine, what the child must have been feeling. All her life, she has always been subjugated to oppression and discrimination.
No matter how many schemes and policies the government introduces, the mentality of people needs to be changed to bring in welfare.
Swachh Bharat Mission, 2014-
On 2nd October 2014, the government of India launched the Swachh Bharat Mission to accelerate the efforts to achieve universal sanitation coverage and to put the focus on sanitation and making India an open defecation free country.
When I was doing my Masters in Social Work, a part of my course was rural immersion for which, our entire social work team had gone to Raichur in North Karnataka. Raichur is embedded with rich culture, meticulous history and is a melting pot of inscriptions, ranging from Sanskrit, Prakrit, Telegu to Arabic, Persian, and Kannada. Raichur has a conflation of religion with the majority being Hindu followed by Islam, Christianity, Jainism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and many others. I was staying at a small hamlet in Raichur called Gonaver with a very loving and welcoming family. Every evening, I along with my team would go for community visits within the village. During the visits, it emerged that many of the houses don’t have toilets and they defecate in the nearby fields.
When we asked the women of the village that the government pays you to build toilets, then why aren’t there any? Their simple answer was “We like going to the fields together. We can discuss our hardships of life together. Many women here are abused by their husbands. Their husbands beat them up. So, talking helps. The only time we can ever talk to each other peacefully is when we go to the fields together and also, the money goes to our Saheb (referring to their husbands). If they want to build the toilets, then we don’t mind using it.”
That day, it was very clear to me that patriarchy is ingrained in us and our thoughts. Unknowingly, we fall into the vicious cycle of patriarchy just like these women in Gonaver, Raichur. Women have always been subjugated to oppression and discrimination and now it has have been normalized as we can see in the above-stated example. To achieve robust welfare, we need to bring equality and equity among all genders, castes, creeds, races, and religions.
Conclusion:
The examples stated above, explains the challenges to achieving robust welfare in India. Discrimination, inequality, unequal opportunities, poverty, child abuse, neglect, drug abuse, political corruption, government accountability, transparency, legitimacy, economic, social, political deprivation, etc. all create a challenge and acts as hurdles in achieving robust welfare. Through this article, we saw how discrimination and patriarchy is still very prevalent in India. We saw how government ASHA and AWA workers are highly overburdened and vehemently underpaid. These examples are just a dot on a big white screen. Many such examples exist and yet they go unnoticed.
The Indian welfare state is a ma-bap state which is responsible for meeting a range of welfare needs for its citizens. The supreme belief was that mass poverty is at the root of India’s social backwardness and underdevelopment. Indira Gandhi’s government displayed greater interventions and highlighted on removing poverty through a policy of “Garibi Hatao” and yet that did not bring much of a change except rhetorical deviations. Instead, this development model perpetuated the marginalization of millions of people and fortified inequality. To achieve welfare in India, we need to look at welfare through multiple lenses. Welfare is not just a debate on growth vs. capabilities or the Gujarat vs. Kerala model. Instead, it is a culmination of both. To achieve robust welfare, we need to look at welfare through various spectra like uplifting the rural and urban economy, economic empowerment of women, proper waste and sewage management, focussing on standard sanitation and hygiene, easier accessibility to low-cost education, setting up of more microfinance institutions, universal healthcare, taking labor welfare measures, social development of the marginalized sections of our society, proper awareness and utmost utilization of welfare schemes proposed by the government of India and changing the mindsets and thought process of people by making them empowered and progressive.
