Why welfare isn't winning elections in India like it used to

India's welfare politics is not collapsing - but its electoral magic may be fading.

Over the past decade, cash transfers, subsidised services and women-focused schemes have become the default grammar of state politics in India, with welfare increasingly used to soften the effects of a growth model that has struggled to generate enough jobs.

Across party lines, governments now promise a familiar basket of benefits: pensions, direct cash transfers, scholarships, free or subsidised electricity, cheap foodgrain, self-help group support for women and allowances for unemployed youth.

What began as a competitive advantage for a few regional parties has hardened into a bipartisan consensus: from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in Tamil Nadu to the Trinamool Congress (TMC) in West Bengal and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Assam, parties now compete less over whether to offer welfare than over how much.

But recent state elections suggest that extensive welfare delivery alone is no longer enough to secure incumbency.

The DMK - long seen as the architect of India's most durable welfare-transfer model - has lost power in Tamil Nadu. Mamata Banerjee's TMC was swept out of office in West Bengal after three terms despite women-centric welfare schemes that had once been central to its electoral dominance. The Congress-led United Democratic Front has returned in Kerala despite the Left Democratic Front government's expansive welfare record. All the three chief ministers who lost were known as welfarist leaders.

"We should resist the easy binary: welfare won or welfare failed," says political scientist Bhanu Joshi.

"Welfare is already the floor of Indian politics. What decides elections now is what parties build above it. Voters understood that long ago. Analysts are still arguing about the floor while the contest has moved to the ceiling."

That, Joshi argues, is why welfare can no longer be viewed in isolation from the broader political coalitions parties assemble around it.

In West Bengal, he says, the TMC's old "electoral equilibrium of welfare delivery, women voters, Muslim consolidation and enough Hindu support" may have fractured, contributing to its loss to the BJP.

In neighbouring Assam, meanwhile, the BJP's rise rests "not only on religious rhetoric but also on welfare schemes, women's self-help groups, roads, state institutions and Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma's image of administrative efficiency", Joshi says.

Women have become central to this expanding welfare architecture - seen both as more reliable managers of household spending and as an increasingly decisive voting bloc whose turnout now often exceeds that of men.

To be sure, the political and fiscal stakes are enormous: India's state governments now run more than 2,000 cash transfer programmes.

According to the latest Ministry of Finance Economic Survey, states are expected to spend roughly $18bn (£13.2bn) on unconditional cash transfers alone in 2025-26, much of it targeted at women.

In just three years, the number of states operating such schemes has increased more than fivefold, including many already running revenue deficits, the survey says.

In some states, the transfers account for as much as half the monthly consumption expenditure of poorer rural households. For female casual labourers and self-employed women, they form a substantial share of income.

Yet the survey reads less like a celebration than a warning.

India's states, it argues, are increasingly borrowing to fund recurring welfare payouts while squeezing spending on roads, schools, health systems and job creation.

With salaries, pensions, subsidies and interest payments already consuming more than 60% of state revenues, every additional rupee spent on cash transfers risks crowding out capital investment - the kind economists associate with longer-term growth and employment.

That trade-off is beginning to shape the political debate too.

"Election after election, we've seen that welfare alone is not enough to win," says Louise Tillin, a professor of politics at King's College London. "It may help at the margins, but it is rarely the decisive factor."

One reason, Tillin says, is the rise of "competitive welfarism": almost every major party now offers some version of cash transfers, subsidies or free services, often trying to outbid rivals during campaigns.

"That makes it harder for voters to distinguish between parties on welfare," she says, "and harder for parties not to have a welfare offer at all."

In a forthcoming paper using government survey data, Tillin found that even many welfare beneficiaries preferred higher public spending on infrastructure over expanded welfare - especially those who voted for the BJP-led government.

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The research points to a growing gap between the political imagination of welfare and the way many recipients themselves understand it.

Voters may value welfare - but increasingly ask what comes after it: jobs, wages, mobility, aspiration.

"People do not aspire to be beneficiaries," says Tillin.

The shift has also reshaped the political language of welfare itself.

"Much of welfare delivery in India remains top-down and paternalistic - the political leader dispenses benefits and claims credit for them. It becomes a politics of gifts rather than rights," says Tillin.

Yamini Aiyar, a senior visiting fellow at Brown University, calls this "techno-patrimonialism" to describe how governments use "cash-transfer technology to recast welfare as a personal gift from political leaders".

Many appear to want something more enduring: jobs, mobility and economic self-worth.

That shift is also reflected in emerging research on how beneficiaries - especially women - view welfare.

"The media produced a narrative of cash transfers leading to electoral success. Political scientists who study elections don't really see a causal link," says Prabha Kotiswaran, a professor of law and social justice at King's College London.

Kotiswaran has researched women beneficiaries across several Indian states. In one project, she and fellow researchers interviewed women a year after cash-transfer schemes were introduced in Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka - states where major parties had increasingly converged around unconditional transfers.

"The majority of the women in all these states said they did not vote for the party in power due to the cash transfers," she says.

Her fieldwork points to something more politically sophisticated than the transactional model often assumed by strategists. Many women, she says, viewed welfare not as a gift exchanged for votes but as partial compensation for state failure.

Some questioned how governments could sustain payouts indefinitely. Others argued that lowering prices or creating jobs mattered more than direct transfers.

"Women were far more worried about various other things, primarily the cost of living, decent work in rural areas for themselves and their educated children, and state specific issues like debt and alcoholism in Tamil Nadu," says Kotiswaran.

Welfare still matters politically, not least because women have become central to India's electoral landscape.

What was once an outlier idea - direct cash transfers to women - has, since 2021, become a near-universal campaign promise across parties.

"I think it is a positive development from a feminist perspective and needs to form the basis for a new generation of rights on the right to care," says Kotiswaran.

But as welfare becomes common across parties, it may no longer be enough on its own to secure voter loyalty.

"A party might get punished for withdrawing welfare. But whether it is getting rewarded (for offering it) is the real question," says Tillin.