FREEBIES VS WELFARE

Inefficiency-breeding political gimmick or a necessity to uplift the poor... Making sense of the great debate

- SHWWETA PUNJ & ANILESH S. MAHAJAN

The monsoon may be on the wane, but it’s still raining freebies across the country. With the Aam Aadmi Party attempting to make inroads into Narendra Modi and Bharatiya Janata Party bastion Gujarat, AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal is pulling out all the stops to woo the electorate. The Delhi chief minister is following the template he honed to perfection to win first the national capital, and more recently Punjab, by a landslide. Among the generous doles he has promised the Gujarat voter are free electricity of up to 300 units a month, a Rs 1,000 monthly allowance for all women above 18, the guarantee of a job to every youth and, until then, a monthly unemployment dole of Rs 3,000.

Kejriwal is not the only one to unabashedly announce what he calls welfare measures but what the prime minister has been denouncing as the revdi (a sesame-coated sweet rock candy distributed free during festivals) or freebie culture for a while now. Few, for example, can beat Jagan Mohan Reddy, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, who has launched a number of welfare schemes since coming to power in 2019 on the back of such announcements. So the mother of a student gets financial aid of Rs 15,000 to encourage parents to send their children to school, farmers receive free or concessional power supply or cash transfers and every farmer gets annual financial assistance of Rs 7,500, self-owned taxi and auto drivers Rs 24,000 and every handloom-owning weaver family Rs 10,000. The largesse will cost the state Rs 27,451 crore—2.1 per cent of its GSDP (gross state domestic product)—threatening to significantly slow down the state’s economic growth rate.