Welfare state | India's road to rights

The decade stands out as one of the most ambitious phases of socio-economic lawmaking since Independence. It was an era when the Indian State sought to redefine its relationship with citizens by moving decisively from welfare as discretion to welfare as entitlement. These laws did not merely redistribute resources. They reshaped expectations, redefined rights and altered the grammar of governance itself.The turning point came in 2005 with the Right to Information (RTI) Act. For the first time, access to government records was no longer a privilege mediated by power, but a statutory right vested in the citizen. RTI cracked open the opaque architecture of the Indian State and forced officials, politicians and institutions into an unprecedented culture of explanation. It also became the backbone of civil society activism and investigative journalism, exposing corruption and inefficiency across sectors. RTI did not clean up the system, but it fundamentally altered the balance of power between the State and the citizen. CITIZEN WATCH: Social activist Aruna Roy demanding public audit and transparency in MGNREGA works in Jaipur, Dec. 2009 (Photo: Purushottam Diwakar) In the same year, Parliament enacted the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. By making employment a legal right for rural households, the law attempted to provide income security at the bottom of the pyramid while creating durable rural assets. While plagued by leakages and uneven implementation, MGNREGA changed rural labour markets, raised wage floors and gave political voice to the poor.The next major leap came with Aadhaar, launched in 2009. Conceived as a biometric identity platform, it sought to solve a persistent problem of Indian governance: the inability of the State to accurately identify beneficiaries. By assigning a unique identity linked to fingerprints and iris scans, Aadhaar promised to eliminate ghost beneficiaries and enable direct benefit transfers. Over time, Aadhaar became the backbone of India’s digital welfare architecture, enabling subsidy reform, financial inclusion, and portability of benefits. At the same time, it raised profound questions about privacy, surveillance and State power that continue to animate constitutional debate..preferred-source-banner{ margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom:10px;} DATABASE NATION: People getting enrolled for Aadhaar card in Pune, Dec. 2011 (Photo: Bhaskar Paul) The rights-based framework reached its most expansive expression with the National Food Security Act of 2013. By legally entitling nearly two-thirds of India’s population to subsidised food grains, the state assumed responsibility for protecting citizens against hunger at a scale never attempted before. Critics questioned its fiscal sustainability and efficiency, but its political logic was unmistakable.Yet, beneath this architecture of empowerment, older social fractures remained stubbornly intact. Caste hierarchies and minority deprivation continued to shape lived realities. The mid-2000s saw intense agitation over the extension of OBC reservations to higher education. The expansion of quotas produced new anxieties, new agitations and new fault lines without resolving the core problem of unequal access to quality education and employment. Similarly, due to the stark educational divide between Muslims and non-Muslims, a large section of Muslim youth risked being excluded from the educated workforce, with potentially explosive social consequences.The paradox of the decade is therefore stark. Welfare laws expanded access, but they did not dismantle structural disadvantage rooted in history, discrimination and geography.- EndsPublished By: Yashwardhan SinghPublished On: Jan 3, 2026Must Watch

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Welfare state | India's road to rights

In this decade, India transformed welfare into legal entitlements through RTI, MGNREGA, Aadhaar and food security, expanding citizenship rights but failing to dismantle caste and minority disadvantage

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