During a hearing on civil writ petitions pertaining to provision of adequate shelter facilities to homeless persons in urban areas, Supreme Court Justice B.R. Gavai chose to criticise the practice of freebies for harming the national work ethic.
He reportedly said: “Unfortunately, because of these freebies, which come on the anvil of the elections…some Ladki Bahin and some other scheme, people are not willing to work…Because of the freebies in Maharashtra, which were just announced prior to the elections, the agriculturalists are not getting labourers. When everybody is getting free rations at home, why would they want to work?”
Justice Gavai described homeless people as “parasites” and their demands for decent shelters, rations, and health as freebies on the assumption that they are unwilling to work. He cites no evidence for this claim. Nor does he seek to find whether the jobs being offered provide decent wages and even then people prefer not to work. His criticism also does not cite any evidence to show that cash transfers prevent people from working since they can just sit at home, do nothing and collect their freebie. These comments are based on anecdotal and personal experience. Contrary to this, economists have found no systematic evidence that cash transfer programmes reduce the propensity to work or the overall number of hours worked for by either men or women.
To think that a monthly cash transfer of Rs. 2000-3000 is enough to make the poor lazy defies logic and reason. He also singled out the policy of free rations as a reason for labourers not going to work. But the free ration given to an individual is just 5 kgs for the entire month and that too primarily cereals. This is less than the average individual cereal consumption in India estimated to be 9 kg a month. If labourers are indeed not going to work, this is not because of free rations, they are just not getting decent wages for agricultural work. The latest Economic Survey points to stagnating or decreased rural wages.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) has found that there is a stark lack of decent employment opportunities in India. Cash transfers have been offered because severe unemployment afflicts the capitalist world, including India. Employment generation is a big concern of the Indian economy. It is not that people don’t want to work, if that was the case, lakhs of people wouldn’t be queuing up to apply for the small number of public sector jobs advertised now and then by the government. For example, for a total of about 1.4 lakh vacancies for various categories of staff in Indian Railways, more than 2.40 crore candidates had applied in 2020. Railways screened 22.5 lakh applicants to recruit 18,799 assistant loco pilots in 2024. Air India recruitment drive for airport loaders led to a stampede-like situation as a massive crowd of job seekers thronged the Mumbai airport in July 2024.
Similarly, huge numbers of workers are registered under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGS). As of October 2023, approximately 13.2 crore active workers were registered under this scheme, while the total number of registered workers is much higher. This shows that people are not reluctant about seeking productive labour or agricultural jobs when they become available. Yet, the budget for MGNREGS has not been increased, leading to pending wages and suppression of work. This scheme was allocated Rs 86,000 crore in the 2025-26 Union Budget. This is the same amount as the 2024-25 budget allocation.
Many of the so-called freebies are a constitutional requirement for social and economic justice in a country that is ranked among the most unequal countries in the world. The World Inequality Database shows that economic inequality in India was higher than the colonial period, and termed it as a Billionaire Raj. However, the ruling party has repeatedly dismissed the concerns of growing economic disparity by giving a corrosively communal colour to wealth redistribution as witnessed in during the toxic election campaign for the Lok Sabha elections last year. India has not even been able to ensure that all its people receive basic food and nutrition, healthcare, housing, educational access, etc. In most other countries, universal access to reasonable quality goods and services that constitute basic needs is seen as the responsibility of the state, these are not viewed as freebies. We need to ensure basic needs for all citizens by shifting to a system of constitutionally guaranteed economic rights which can be financed by wealth and inheritance taxes.
More importantly, if the political process compels parties to respond to basic needs, this must be welcomed, especially in the case of women related schemes. Political parties may manipulate a right as a benefit for electoral considerations. But to accuse women of not being willing to work because of modest cash transfers or welfare schemes is doing injustice to women’s work. It is also factually incorrect as a large majority of women are already working, doing unpaid work in the domestic sphere and also often unpaid work in family enterprises, including in agricultural operations. According to a State Bank of India (SBI) survey of 2023-24, if the extent of women’s unpaid work is monetised, it would amount to a mammoth 22 lakh crore rupees a year, which would be around seven per cent of the GDP that year. Thus it is not that women are not working, but that they are working without any remuneration.
The word freebies reflects the class privilege of those using the term, including members of the judiciary, industrialists, business executives, journalists or people occupying high positions who deride social welfare schemes as freebies even as they themselves receive all kinds of benefits.
The government recently announced a slew of extra retirement benefits for Chief Justices of India and Supreme Court judges (not to be confused with freebies). Similarly, tax cuts given to the corporate sector are not to be confused with freebies. Even as many welfare schemes are seen as wasteful, there is predictable silence over the billions of rupees worth of bad loans, owed to the public sector banks, being written off the banks’ balance sheets.
There can’t be a better example of freebies than the write-offs of non-performing assets (NPAs) of large corporate loans in the last few years paid for by Indian taxpayers.
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The main reason for cash transfer is simply this: the Indian economy under the current regime is not generating enough jobs. It is attempting to acquire political power without producing large employment opportunities, thus having to offer cash transfers to the people. But these transfers are inadequate compensation for the scarcity of employment and minimum wages. If transfers are to be stopped then the government must provide decent jobs to people in lieu of transfers. The failure to do so has made a vast majority of Indians pessimistic about joblessness in the country, according to the Mood of the Nation Survey of February 2025 conducted by India Today and C-Voter. Most of those surveyed felt that the unemployment situation in the country was very serious or somewhat serious. In this dismal situation, the aforesaid remarks by the highest court on social welfare schemes, constitute a political and ideological assault on the rights of the working people and the welfare state envisioned in the Constitution.
Zoya Hasan is Professor Emerita, Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
