In India, access to welfare benefits is increasingly being entangled with extensive documentation, household profiling, and citizenship-related verification, which is disproportionately affecting minorities and redefining the meaning of democracy.
The Architecture of India’s Welfare Regime
Postcolonial India’s governance and politics aligned closely with the principles of a welfare state. So much so that it had been a training ground for a plethora of welfare schemes and programs in the years to come. The initial leaders of the Indian polity had clearly advocated this by launching the centralised Five-Year Plans and implementing the Community Development Program in 1952 under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. However, due to certain accessibility shortcomings, the CDP was eventually phased out. But it formed one of the initial attempts to establish the structure of welfare and governance in India.
What followed was a tumultuous era, culminating in the deaths of two prominent leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had been the country’s first two Prime Ministers. Finally, the intervention came in the form of the Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS) in 1973, aimed at providing rural employment. And it was on the structure and theme of this EGS (Employment Guarantee Scheme) that the well-acclaimed Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act was modelled. There was also the PDS (Public Distribution System), introduced in the country as early as 1943 during World War II, which was equally essential, though its critics initially flagged it for an urban bias.
Therefore, the initial phase of postcolonial Indian politics was largely characterised by centralised planning and welfare schemes, which began to shift with the rise of political regionalisation and economic liberalisation in the early 1990s (Tillin, 2022). It was during this time that many state governments began to initiate their own social schemes and provisions layered on top of the centralised ones, forming the basis for political support, clientelism, and mobilisation in the subsequent years.
When access to benefits becomes tied to extensive documentation, household profiling, and citizenship-related verification, welfare begins to serve a purpose beyond redistribution. It becomes a mechanism through which the state gathers information, classifies populations, and determines who is entitled to recognition and support. The debate goes beyond administrative effectiveness or election promises; it raises larger questions about citizenship and democratic accountability, and, above all, the relationship between citizens and the state.
Over time, the welfare architecture in India underwent substantial political regionalisation, particularly during the UPA government (2004-2014) at the Centre (Tillin, 2022). The state governments, therefore, garnered considerable credit for the successful implementation of the central government-led schemes (Tillin & Pereira, 2017). This ranged from a wide array of social provisioning in the domains of education, food, and employment. Among them, one stood out in particular: the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which provided demand-driven employment to rural households for a minimum of 100 days.
It is in this context that the policy frameworks, governance mechanisms, and politics became more regionalised. Within this trajectory of India’s welfare state, the recent addition has been the Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) schemes, which have mainly evolved as conditional and unconditional cash transfer schemes across various states.
Cash transfers have a long history, dating back 2500 years to ancient Athens (483 BC), where the excavation of a silver mine was followed by a referendum regarding its allocation among the masses: a community-based ownership of resources, and hence a similar structure of cash transfer and distribution(Gentilini, 2024). This is also evident in Alaska, where cash transfers from the annual oil dividend take place within the community (Gentilini, 2026).
According to data from the World Bank’s 2025 report, social protection has expanded to cover 4.7 billion people worldwide, including in low- and middle-income countries. Three out of four people in these countries live in households that either benefit from social protection transfers or have access to social protection through contributions. But this figure does not capture the full scope of the situation, as 2 billion people in these countries remain uncovered or only partially covered by social protection(World Bank Group, 2025). Similarly, the World Inequality Report states that the poorest half of the global population accounts for less than 10% of global income (World Inequality Lab, 2026).
However, rather than analysing the effectiveness of such social protection measures, this article focuses on how a particular cash-transfer-based social protection scheme (Annapurna Bhandar) in the state of West Bengal, India, recently introduced under the aegis of the BJP government in the state, is bringing about newer dimensions to discussions of democracy, welfare, and citizenship.
Cash Transfers, both Conditional and Unconditional, have increased globally, including in India. The Dibao program in China, Oportunidades in Mexico, and the Bolsa Família in Brazil, among others, have emerged as among the most popular cash transfer programs worldwide. In India, cash transfers, or Direct Benefit Transfers as they are known today, were consolidated with the country’s subsequent digitisation and the arrival of the Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, and mobile (JAM), which facilitated direct bank account transfers and shifted welfare service delivery to the digital domain.
However, it was in 2013 that the DBT mission was initiated as a pilot across the country to reduce duplication and fraud and accurately target beneficiaries. Since then, the PAHAL scheme (cylinder subsidy), Rythu Bandhu (farmer cash transfer in Telangana), and the recent Ladli Behna scheme are some examples of DBT schemes in the country. In West Bengal, under the Previous TMC government, cash transfer schemes made considerable inroads into the state’s governance mechanisms and were also acclaimed globally. For instance, the Kanyashree scheme for school-going adolescent girls from economically disadvantaged families received the United Nations Public Service Award in 2017 (Kundu, 2017).
Following the trajectory of the welfare regime in the State of West Bengal, we focus on the Annapurna Bhandar Scheme, launched by the BJP after coming to power in May 2026, which replaces the former Lakhsmir Bhandar scheme. Under the Lakhsmir Bhandar, women would receive a monthly cash transfer of Rs 1,200 (SC/ST) and Rs 1,000 (General and other categories). This was replaced by Rs 3,000 per month under the Annapurna Bhandar Scheme, the locus of this current discussion.
The Entry of the Annapurna Bhandar Scheme in Bengal Politics
With the change of hands following the announcement of the West Bengal Assembly election results on the 4th of May, one thing has been the subject of much discussion. The career of the social welfare and cash disbursal schemes in the state. The TMC has been known for many reasons: its corruption-induced party organisation, proven instances of money laundering, scams involving government exams, negligence regarding women’s safety, etc. But it is also regarded for its flagship welfare schemes and cash disbursement mechanisms in the state. The BJP, the principal opposition party in the state for the last few years, also has a well-established network of cash-disbursal schemes across the country.
Following suit, it too launched its campaign in the West Bengal assembly elections by doubling the existing cash disbursal rate under the TMC. The stage was thus set, Rs 1500 vs Rs 3000. Ultimately, for reasons well discussed by scholars, academicians, and political analysts, the Rs 3000 bid won the game, and the common masses of the state have since been looking forward to this new set of welfare schemes. Hence, for appreciation or criticism, the question of the future of such schemes has remained in the headlines since then.
On 23rd May, in a publicly stated press byte, BJP MLA Agnimitra Paul, unequivocally stated that, “There is no question of verification. All beneficiaries of the Lakshmi Bhandar scheme will be automatically enrolled in the Annapurna Bhandar scheme. During the previous government’s tenure, you received Rs 1000 or Rs 1500; now you would receive Rs 3000. Even those who are in the process of applying for citizenship under the CAA would also be eligible for the same.”
Cut short to the 29th of May, the rhetoric shifted towards a more screening-oriented process, driven by the 12 to 13-page-long application form that required beneficiaries to provide detailed information about their existence. This includes the number of rooms, the size of landholdings, detailed Aadhaar information for all family members, and the CAA application status. Therefore, what began as an inclusive welfare scheme has, overnight, become a mechanism of exclusion. This shift raises an important question: Is Annapurna Bhandar merely a welfare scheme designed to distribute financial assistance, or is it also a mechanism through which the state seeks to classify, monitor, and regulate its citizens?
There is, of course, legitimate criticism of direct cash transfer programs. There’s a standard criticism of welfare schemes that keeps resurfacing, and it’s not entirely unfair: they help people manage difficult circumstances without doing much to change those circumstances. Direct cash transfer doesn’t create jobs; these welfare schemes may provide temporary relief but fail to address deeper structural issues such as unemployment, poverty, child marriage, social inequality, and so on. West Bengal makes the point without anyone having to stretch for it. Years of welfare spending have coexisted with unemployment figures that remain high, child marriage rates that consistently rank among the worst nationally, and social inequalities that haven’t moved much at all.
However, the current debate around the Annapurna Bhandar extends beyond the usual discussions about the effectiveness of cash transfers. The concern lies in how eligibility is determined. The rigorous data-collection process embedded in the scheme’s structure raises broader political and democratic concerns.
The Politics of Discipline and Categorisation
At first glance, the Annapurna Scheme, launched by the BJP government, appears organised and transparent. They argue that welfare benefits should be available only to those genuinely in need and that a rigorous verification process is necessary to identify them, thereby preventing misuse. Given longstanding complaints about the misuse of funds intended for ineligible beneficiaries and leaks within welfare programs, this argument may appear reasonable.
However, a closer look at this scheme suggests it does much more than identify beneficiaries. At face value, it embodies a transparent process with a substantial increase in the existing cash transfer for the women, but it is a process that comes along with the submission of a 12- 13-page-long application, noting critical personal details of individuals; a physical verification process of the application and documents by government officials; and the utilisation of this information for future government-led social service schemes.
Thus, beneath this well-placed structure, there is a steady process of gathering information bundles that echo ‘institutional regulation’ rather than a facilitation mechanism for welfare, an institutional attempt to establish its own ideas of citizenship, and thereby redraw the normative categories of democracy, citizenship, and welfare, respectively. This article discusses this very contention.
But, is this mechanism unique to the State of West Bengal under the right-wing-ruled Bharatiya Janata Party and its ideology of Hindutva?
Empirical evidence suggests that the growing intersection between welfare delivery and surveillance is not confined to India or to countries in the Global South. Recent developments in countries of the Global North that have strong welfare policies are being accused of discriminating against the refugees and migrants of the Global South. Let’s take the case of Denmark, a country frequently celebrated for its comprehensive welfare policies and robust democratic institutions, which is introducing newer mechanisms of control and order through welfare. This suggests that the remodelling of welfare into a mechanism of surveillance and classification is increasingly becoming a broader feature of contemporary governance.
This comparison is particularly significant because it highlights the growing entanglement of welfare with data extraction, mass surveillance, and citizenship, which is not limited to authoritarian, populist, or majoritarian political models in the global south but has also emerged within longstanding liberal-democratic welfare states.
“Coded Injustice: Surveillance and Discrimination in Denmark’s Automated Welfare State”—a 2024 report by Amnesty International—reveals how Udbetaling Danmark (UDK), the Danish welfare authority, uses an AI-driven fraud detection tool with data-sharing structures to identify individuals with a suspicion of potential welfare fraud. To facilitate this assessment, the administrative authorities collect large amounts of personal information, including birth details, citizenship and nationality records, connections with foreign countries, travel history, and so on. This constructs an extensive profiling of the welfare recipient, allowing the state to continuously monitor and assess their eligibility for benefits.
The Danish case here is particularly pertinent for the discussion because it not only utilises the technology itself but also the underlying structure behind it, through which the welfare becomes a tool for surveillance and classification.
Their findings also reveal that the algorithmic models that are being used excessively scrutinise the refugees, migrants, racialised communities, and low-income households. The actual point of concern is the use of indicators such as “foreign affiliation” and “atypical family arrangements” as variables in the fraud detection system. These indicators do not simply map welfare beneficiaries; rather, they create an environment of suspicion in which individuals are visible to the state as potential threats that require continuous monitoring and verification.
The Danish case study illustrates how the welfare system gradually becomes a structural mechanism through which the state classifies citizens, controls access to public resources, and distinguishes between deserving and undeserving beneficiaries. Thus, the study shows that the public welfare system is not merely a redistributive mechanism; it also functions as a tool of surveillance and demographic profiling.
In Foucauldian terms, welfare systematically operates as a technology of governmentality, through which populations are quantified, classified, and governed not merely through coercion but administrative documentation and systematic surveillance.
The importance of this comparison lies not only in suggesting that Denmark and West Bengal are in an identical political context. The institutional framework, social realities, and governance model of the two remain significantly different. Yet both cases illustrate a common ground within contemporary welfare regimes, i.e., the institutional expansion of welfare governance into a model of surveillance, profiling, and population management.
In Denmark, this trajectory is driven through algorithmic models and the monitoring of migrants and welfare beneficiaries. Similarly, in West Bengal’s case, this emerges through large-scale household documentation, physical verification, and the incorporation of citizenship-led CAA status and SIR-linked eligibility requirements (voter-list revision).
The Annapurna Bhandar in West Bengal, therefore, appears to be established on the same model as part of a broader global shift in which welfare is mostly mediated through data collection, verification, and classification. West Bengal’s case highlights a significant aspect of this global trend: how welfare verification is intertwined with the question of citizenship, belonging, and democratic inclusion.
Redefining the normative conceptions of Welfare, Citizenship, and democracy in India
The application form begins with establishing the ‘Head of the Family’; then moving on to noting the detailed information of all the family members with their name, date of birth, gender, relation with the head of the family, Aadhaar details; bank account details of all adult family members and the head; EPIC ID or the voter card number of all adult members; description of house size, whether pucca or not; ownership of land and vehicles; CAA status (if applied), SIR status (If required), literacy rate; income tax information; and the total annual family income, among others.
The projected idea behind such a detailed enumeration of socio-economic data is that it would ensure that welfare schemes are rightfully extended. This provides us with one thing quite explicitly: That the application does not simply collect information about the individual seeking assistance. Instead, it maps that entire household. This distinction is politically significant, as it helps us recognise that welfare registration and access have now been transformed into a structural mechanism for documentation and standardisation. The purpose is no longer merely to facilitate access to benefits; it is also to produce a detailed database of citizens and households. The language of welfare thus becomes increasingly intertwined with the language of surveillance, categorisation, and administrative regulations.
The process of cash transfer for women in Bengal now requires documenting their entire household data and subsequent physical verification by government officials. Therefore, this raises the question: Is the Annapurna scheme registration intended to identify and facilitate beneficiaries, or to screen and assess beneficiary eligibility? This is quite unequivocally clarified by government representatives, who have stated that this process would indeed identify who was to receive the benefits of such a cash transfer; a mere application does not automatically entitle one to receive it.
However, this runs completely counter to the BJP’s pre-poll campaign promises and to the public statement made by MLA Agnimitra Paul. Therefore, beneath the carefully disseminated electoral campaigns of ‘welfare for all’ and the rhetoric of facilitation and the systematic organisation of welfare post-elections, the aim is to draw a boundary around cash transfer recipients. It involves limiting the list of welfare recipients. Therefore, the Annapurna scheme, in its rhetoric, is a co-constitutive process of inclusion and exclusion (the inclusion of some by the exclusion of others).
This development is not entirely new within the Indian context. Welfare programs in India have historically operated through categories. It was never attached to citizenship as a universal entitlement; it has an essence of charity and patronage rather than due rights (DPSP), and it involves the creation of categories. The latter can be seen in various schemes extended to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, as well as in APL-BPL Ration cards, which have tapped into a crucial gap in the country’s social welfare architecture.
The Annapurna Scheme, as laid out, aligns well with the existing categorisation mechanism, but in a different light. It categorises a group of women beneficiaries based on a screening process involving a 12-page form and has already excluded those disenfranchised under the SIR 2026 or other regulations of the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2024.
Thus, a few questions are particularly important here: What standards would be used to evaluate the information provided by the individuals? What would be the criteria of denial or inclusion into the welfare structure? When documents become primary to the receipt of welfare benefits, what would be the plight of those communities or households that were affected by any natural disasters or calamities recently and lost their documents? Finally, given the invocation of the discourse of the ‘moral and rightful recipients’ of welfare, how does it interact with the notions of citizenship in the country, amidst the processes of SIR and the ‘Bangladeshi-infiltrator’ rhetoric? Given this, what would ensure transparency in this eligibility-checking procedure?
Adding to that is the difficulty in producing official documents for the religious minorities and other marginalised groups. This immediately holds true in the case of the residents of rural North Bengal, where heavy floods have caused tremendous devastation to the lives and property of the marginalised, leading to serious apprehensions during the SIR process in the State as well. One need not ponder the fact that cash transfer schemes are meant for the marginalised, who, however, as in the case of North Bengal, have often lost access to, or lack, a complete repository of official documents.
Therefore, this ambiguity and the eligibility-checking process put beneficiaries at the mercy of the government, the informal structures of its party organisation, or the bureaucracy to ensure their names are listed as ‘potential beneficiaries.’ The individuals applying for the welfare scheme and their livelihoods then become substantially enmeshed within these governance structures.
This brings forth an important theoretical intervention by Professor Dwaipayan Bhattacharya, who had described the erstwhile phase under the Left Front government as one of ‘party society.’ It is a mechanism of governance in which the party organisation’s structures are deeply entrenched in the lives of its citizens. The phase under TMC is described as one that embodies a ‘Franchisee politics’, in which the brand of Mamata is systematically invoked at different levels to ensure legitimacy.
The current phase, under the BJP, after the assembly elections of 2026, showcases a tendency to amalgamate both the phenomenon of ‘Franchisee of Modi’ and also a return to the one closer to a ‘party society’, where the mechanism of governance through the informal structures of its party organisation, or the bureaucracy, would be utilised to intervene in the lives of the commoners, something that the application process of the Annapurna Bhandar scheme clearly portrays.
Therefore, underlying the projected attempt at purifying the lists of potential beneficiaries to imbibe an inclusionary welfare regime, it is a process of excluding the ‘potential intruders’ in receiving the welfare schemes at the very primary stage of this process, and also an entrenchment of the party and its organisational structures in the daily lives and spaces of the individuals.
While noting the process of exclusion, the idea of citizenship delineated by the current political dispensation becomes particularly important. This is because the form explicitly states that those whose names were removed from the SIR lists are ineligible for the welfare scheme. Given the publicly stated directive to use this data collection process for future welfare services, it is also evident that those disenfranchised through the recent SIR process would be completely removed from the state’s welfare architecture, thereby revealing the dynamics of citizenship and welfare that the BJP is trying to establish.
The discourse of citizenship in the wake of CAA, 2024 regulations has already targeted the Muslims, thereby bringing into discussion what Chirashree Dasgupta would term as ‘insecure citizenships’ and the academic and policy circles terming it as highly discriminatory. In this regard, it is important to note that stating the CAA status on the application form is presented as an inclusionary practice.
However, in reality, it further entrenches the politics of minority exclusion by leveraging those who applied for CAA (that is, people from all religious groups who arrived in India after 2014 as a result of proven religious persecution, except the Muslims) as eligible citizens, and hence eligible candidates for receiving the benefits of government-extended welfare schemes. It thus solidifies the attempt at setting a normative idea of citizenship in India by the BJP, wherein the minority Muslims are evicted from the very discourse.
This existing problem is further compounded by the SIR list, which has led to a significant erasure of minority names, whose appeal status is further complicated by tribunals and Form 7 applications. The exclusion of nearly 90 lakh voters from the SIR process in West Bengal complicates the BJP’s claim of pursuing a uniformly pro-Hindu citizenship agenda. The data suggests that around 63 % of those excluded are Hindus, and around 34% are Muslims, indicating that the effects of citizenship verification extend beyond religious minorities alone. However, the burden of exclusion is unevenly distributed. Refugee Hindu communities, particularly Matuas and Namashudras, are positioned differently as their access to citizenship recognition and associated welfare benefits is increasingly tied to the CAA application process.
This creates a phenomenon of conditional inclusion in which legal recognition and welfare entitlements become contingent upon participation in citizenship verification mechanisms. In this sense, the verification not only operates as an administrative exercise but also as a coercive framework that compels vulnerable populations to seek validations through state-defined citizenship pathways. Existing studies have further demonstrated that Dalits and Muslims have been disproportionately affected by disenfranchisement arising from such verification exercises, while data from the SABAR institute indicates that women constituted one of the most affected groups during the SIR process.
Welfare, Redistribution, and Structural Transformation
None of this suggests that welfare programs should be rejected outright. Direct cash transfers have become a central feature of contemporary Indian politics, regardless of party ideology. While the BJP criticises DBTs and calls it the ‘Revdi culture’, they have themselves been exemplary by noting the successes of their DBTs in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Odisha, as well as in their recently triumphed UT of Delhi.
While criticisms of the cash transfer schemes are plentiful, there is also an alternative lens through which to view them, which has been rightly extended by scholars of Indian politics. As Dwaipayan Bhattacharya has argued, “Freebies are often treated as political or fiscal aberrations. In reality, they are neither. They are economic and social necessities in a political economy where capitalism increasingly struggles to reproduce livelihoods through wages alone. In short, freebies are not primarily subsidies to the poor; they are mechanisms that contain political tension and subsidise capital when it fails to reproduce labour through wages”. (India Forum, April 17, 2026)
At the same time, welfare cannot be viewed as a substitute for broader social and economic transformation. Cash transfers may ease immediate hardships, but they do not automatically address entrenched problems such as unemployment, caste inequalities, gender discrimination, or the lack of quality public services. West Bengal’s continuing struggles with issues such as child marriage, economic precarity, and social exclusion illustrate the limits of cash-transfer-based welfare as a tool for long-term change.
According to the Capability approach of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, capabilities enhance freedom. But it is not enough to have avenues for developing capabilities; they must also be accessible. They must also be sustainable enough to be reproduced multiple times. Therefore, it is not enough to provide material cash transfers when the socio-economic and political realities of our country reflect political rights without social democracy. Caste-discrimination has increased manifold. Bengal, once claimed to be immune to caste politics, has shown how caste plays a major role in the micro-spaces of daily life and has become vital to the state’s political configurations.
This includes the electoral and policy considerations of political outfits in the state seeking to woo the Namashudras, Rajbanshis, and Kurmis, among others. Until we target the socio-cultural base of the society and its politics, the trajectory of welfare and social services would never be directed towards sustained capacity building and progress. It would remain as a tool in the hands of the ruling class to further its political projects- Institutional regulation, redefining norms of citizenship and democracy, perpetuating social inequalities, etc.
However, the more pressing question raised by Annapurna Bhandar is not whether cash transfers or welfare schemes of this kind should exist, but how they are organised and administered in contemporary Indian democracy. When access to benefits becomes tied to extensive documentation, household profiling, and citizenship-related verification, welfare begins to serve a purpose beyond redistribution. It becomes a mechanism through which the state gathers information, classifies populations, and determines who is entitled to recognition and support. The debate goes beyond administrative effectiveness or election promises; it raises larger questions about citizenship and democratic accountability, and, above all, the relationship between citizens and the state. It changes the definitions of ‘a citizen’, grips institutional control, and substantially strives to alter the meaning of democracy.
Image Credit: “Citizenship Amendment Act protests in Guwahati” by Dr Vikramjit Kakati, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
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