The New Welfare Politics: Inclusion at the Polls, Exclusion in Policy

The Delhi high court warned the Delhi government that its flagship scheme for women’s welfare, which it had advertised during its election campaign, the Delhi Laxmi Yojana, would be scrapped on the grounds of it being arbitrary, if even one eligible woman is denied benefit. What forced the court to give such a stern warning was the last-moment clause added by the Rekha Gupta government of the mandatory requirement of a letter from the local MP or MLA to prove eligibility. The bench asked what purpose this condition serves when there are, in the court’s words, “thousands of ways” to establish eligibility. 

This legal dispute might appear to be about Rs 2,500 a month. But the question it raises is larger: how much can the terms of an electoral promise change after an election has taken place, or, essentially, been won?

The episode is a manifestation of the pattern common to India’s newest and most politically-prized instrument of welfare, the direct cash transfer to women, road-tested with Madhya Pradesh’s Ladli Behna, scaled decisively in Maharashtra’s Ladki Bahin, and now attempted from Bihar to Odisha to New Delhi. In India, today, the most important feature of this welfare politics is not whom it includes, but the ingenuity with which it excludes.

The fine print

The scheme, conceived in the Cabinet Decision of 2025, originally named the Mahila Samridhi Yojana, had an outlay of Rs 5,100 crore, without any exclusion clause, and the same framework was carried forward for two consecutive assembly budgets.

However, in August 2026, when the scheme was formally launched with the opening of its registration portal, the exclusionary clause appeared, viz.: mandatory endorsement from an MP or MLA, ten years of continuous residence, a cap of three children, a household electricity bill of 2,400 units a year, and disqualification for criminal antecedents. While all of these conditions to avail the benefits of a welfare scheme are novel and almost never witnessed before in Delhi, what really stood out was the mandatory nature of approval from an MP/MLA.

This is not to say that there should not be any eligibility criteria. Of course, some benchmark for eligibility is indispensable. But those particular ones mentioned above are blatantly discriminatory and exclusionary in nature. The message seems to be very conspicuous – this welfare scheme is for certain women, who adhere to the BJP’s narrow idea of a ‘Bhartiya nari’ who in the BJP's eyes is worth saving and serving.

The constitutional test

Each of these conditions, when looked at closely, raises a distinct constitutional question. Making a monthly welfare payment contingent upon the goodwill or endorsement of an MP or MLA introduces political discretion into what is supposed to operate as a legal entitlement. The moment access to welfare begins to depend upon the approval of an elected representative, arbitrariness enters the scheme, the kind of arbitrariness that the Supreme Court held to be violative of Article 14 in Shayara Bano v. Union of India.

The 10-year domicile requirement raises another problem altogether. It sits uneasily with the right to reside and settle freely under Article 19(1)(e), while also disproportionately affecting tenant women, whose electricity connections are often not even in their own names but in those of their landlords. The three-child condition goes still further: it takes the welfare state into the domain of a woman’s reproductive choices, an area which courts have increasingly located within the right to privacy and personal autonomy under Article 21. Similarly, an electricity-consumption ceiling becomes a rather crude proxy for determining income, particularly in joint households where electricity use tells very little about the economic condition of an individual woman.

And then comes another troubling exclusion, barring women on the basis of criminal records without a conviction. To deny a welfare benefit merely because a woman has been accused, without her guilt having been judicially established, is effectively to penalise her before conviction. 

Over and above, a scheme with no grievance redressal mechanism to appeal a rejection, or to compel an MP/MLA who simply declines to sign, falls short of the fair procedure required under Article 21, as laid down in Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India. Courts have consistently, and rightly, declined to second-guess how much a state spends on welfare; that is a legislative and electoral question, not a judicial one. Whether a state may exclude arbitrarily while distributing that welfare is a different matter, and squarely within judicial competence.

The constitutional objection running through these conditions is therefore not that the state cannot classify. It is whether the classifications bear a reasonable relationship to the purpose for which the welfare is being given.

The welfare question therefore becomes a democratic one as well: can an electoral promise remain broad at the moment of pre-election vote-seeking, when it may influence a voter’s choice, and become considerably narrower at the moment of delivery in the name of policy design? It is this gap between politics and policy which creates a deeper democratic problem. Parties remain largely free to make politically consequential promises before elections, while mechanisms to hold them accountable when those promises are narrowed, altered or not fulfilled remain weak to absent.

Political gatekeeping

Hyperfocusing on the clause of the MP/MLA requirement, we need to make something very clear. The idea of making a welfare scheme from the advertisement before election days is an attempt to convert political objectives into rules, an attempt to deliver on promises. It strengthens the relationship between the legislator and the voter.

But adding a seemingly arbitrary clause as a qualification for taking benefits of such a scheme, such as the mandatory MP/MLA letter, makes a mockery of such a relationship by making it conditional. It also creates an obvious democratic question. What happens to a woman represented by a political opponent of the government? What happens if an MP or MLA refuses, delays or simply does not respond? A welfare entitlement cannot easily remain an entitlement if access to it depends upon another person’s willingness to certify the claimant.

Political manipulation and democratic gap

In 2022, the ruling party’s leadership publicly condemned what it called “revdi culture” — the practice of promising free benefits to win votes — as fiscally reckless. Barely three years later, state governments led by the same party had made direct cash transfers to women among their most prominent electoral offerings. Delhi’s own pre-election campaign promised Rs 2,500 a month to “women in the capital,” without any eligibility condition, projected as a “Modi ki guarantee” from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The conditions emerged only after the electoral victory and the scheme went live.

Ultimately, the deeper problem is structural, and not unique to Delhi. None of these women-centric cash-transfer schemes exists as an Act of a legislature. Each is run through executive notification, which means eligibility can be tightened administratively, without legislative debate, long after the political benefit of the original promise has been collected. When a scheme is passed by the assembly, major eligibility changes must be made publicly. When it is only notified, the government can narrow eligibility through an order.

Public trust is damaged when the elected government displays such sinister tactics to narrow the welfare schemes reaching the masses, schemes which helped them win the elections. The gap between the broad pre-election promises versus the post-election delivery often lies in the fine print. The devil is always in the details. Until India’s welfare state is constructed on the foundation of statute and not sheer opportunism, such a pattern will keep on recurring in Delhi as well as in other states.

This is why the Delhi high court’s observation of August 24 becomes paramount, beyond its observation of the MP/MLA letter or the Rs 2,500 transfer. It highlights this gap between a political promise and a policy delivery.

Abhishek Sharma is a senior policy and political researcher. Views expressed are personal.

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