Bengal Elections: Despite Criticism, Didi’s Doles Take Poll Centre Stage

Last year, when the Trinamool Congress (TMC) released the ‘Development Report Card’—a comprehensive record of the government’s performance in various sectors since 2011, one did not expect a rather formal document to start off with a jibe—“The central government owes Bengal more than Rs 1.96 lakh crore, yet, for the past 15 years, this government has successfully worked and will continue to work for the people.”

The jibe, besides has taken centre stage this poll season. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has continued to claim that despite the state withholding crucial dues, the hallmark of the TMC’s 15-year rule in the state has been its slew of welfare and financial assistance schemes.

For Banerjee, schemes like Lakshmir Bhandar, Kanyashree and Rupashree have almost become euphemisms for the government over the years. The electoral performance of the TMC in the last few polls, including the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, despite mounting challenges, has been attributed to the success of these schemes and their immense popularity in rural and sub-urban areas, feel analysts.

Riding on the wave, the party expectedly played into its welfarism push in the interim budget in February, beefing up amounts for the existing schemes and announcing new ones.

The flagship Lakshmir Bhandar scheme, a direct cash transfer scheme for women aged 25 to 60, got the biggest boost—the assistance amounts offered to general category women and those from SC and ST categories have been increased from Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 to Rs 1,500 and Rs 1,700, respectively. The pre-poll budget proposed another Rs 15,000 crore for the scheme, over the Rs 17,000 crore spent in the previous fiscal.

In another major pre-poll push, Banerjee announced a new cash transfer scheme named Banglar Yuva Sathi—unemployed youth aged 21 to 40, who have passed Madhyamik and are not covered under any social security scheme of the government other than educational benefit or scholarship, shall be entitled to monthly assistance of Rs 1,500 till they get a job or up to five years, whichever is earlier. Proposed to come into effect from August, the TMC sped up registration camps across January, launching the scheme in March, a comfortable month before the polls.

Besides this, the Banerjee government also made a budgetary allocation of Rs 2,000 crore for its 100-day job scheme, Mahatma-Shree, which it recently renamed after the Centre’s scheme was changed to VB-G-Ram-G from MGNREGA, dropping Mahatma Gandhi’s name from the scheme. Alleging that the Centre had stopped the release of funds three years ago, the state allocated funds for the first time since its announcement. Keeping the game of optics breathing, Banerjee also announced an increase of Rs 500 in the monthly honorarium for purohits and muezzins, with them receiving Rs 2,000 per month now.

The welfare schemes have been condensed under the manifesto and 10 election promises in Banerjee’s name, where besides the mentioned schemes, she promises a Rs 30,000 crore agri-budget, permanent housing for every family in Bengal, piped drinking water, annual ‘Duare Chikitsa’ (treatment at the doorstep) camps in every block, infrastructural upgradation in all government schools, old age pension support for all existing beneficiaries to positioning of Bengal as the ‘Gateway of trade for Eastern India’ with logistical upgradation and the establishment of seven new districts through geographical reorganisation.

Despite the welfare push, the TMC’s slew of schemes has always been under the scanner, with opposition camps and economists criticising the overdependence on cash-transfer schemes and the misallocation of budgets directed at reaping electoral dividends. The schemes—94 launched since 2011, according to state government data—have earned the TMC the epithet of ‘bhaata sarkaar’ (allowance government).

Recently, senior CPI(M) leader and lawyer Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya criticised Banerjee’s ‘freebie culture’, saying that “funds for these doles are being borrowed from the market” contributing to Bengal becoming one of the most debt-stressed states in the country, where according to this year’s interim budget, the state’s outstanding debt is projected to exceed Rs 8.15 lakh crore. Banerjee argues that the TMC government has been successful in keeping all the welfare schemes going despite the Left government leaving behind a debt burden of almost Rs two lakh crore.
The TMC top brass have often accused the BJP of implementing schemes along the lines of Lakshmir Bhandar in other states to reap electoral benefits while criticising the same in Bengal.

Referring to the Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana launched in Bihar just ahead of the Assembly elections last year, she said: “The BJP follows a pattern in other states. Before the vote, dus hazaar; after the vote, bulldozer. We have been giving funds (under Lakshmir Bhandar) every year, consistently for many years. We have spent Rs 74,000 crore on this programme alone.” The scheme’s popularity can be measured from the fact that the CPI(M) leadership has accepted that it would keep this scheme running if it came back to power.

Despite the popularity of welfare schemes and the political ripple effects, economists have been critical of the TMC’s focus on cash transfer schemes and the socio-economic impact they will have in the long run.

Economist Maitreesh Ghatak shares Bhattacharya’s concern about the possibility of the state falling into a debt trap but offers a diagnostic take on general issues that arise in assessing any policy of any state. “We need two dimensions of comparison, namely, what was the extent to which the debt went up in the last 10 or 15 years of the Left rule and then consider what has happened in the subsequent years. And the other is what’s happening in the other states,” he says. “In the last 15 years, a lot of things have changed. We have a government at the Centre which has very explicitly switched from in-kind to direct benefit transfer programmes. We also need to calibrate by what is happening nationally and what is happening in the case of West Bengal,” he adds.

Speaking of the much-contested Yuva Sathi scheme, Ghatak does not discard the scheme as entirely useless, referring to an intellectual disagreement between economists Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati, where Bhagwati argues that growth is the best long-term poverty alleviation strategy while Sen prioritises investment in social infrastructure, welfare schemes and safety nets to tackle poverty.

Elaborating by giving an example, Ghatak says: “If a scheme like the Kanyashree helps women push off early marriage, and get some skills, training, education, then there’s an element of investment. A kid could say that because I got some of these benefit programmes, I managed three meals a day, and that is where Sen would come in stating that is also an investment. On the other hand, according to Bhagwati, if you’re not creating jobs, how long can these welfare measures be sustained as the state would eventually run out of money.” However, Ghatak argues that even if one takes a libertarian viewpoint, welfare schemes are needed in society with a structure of a welfare state, however imperfect, existing to prevent social unrest.

However, placing his opinion, Ghatak adds: “The only positive case I can make for these schemes having spillover benefits in creating jobs or helping with economic growth is increasing the size of the pie versus trying to split the existing pie where the classic redistribution vs growth debate sets in. But given the job creation scenario that we have in West Bengal, every policy that is in place right now should be tested on how what it is doing for job creation and any incremental policies that are not helping that direction could well be validly criticized as populism.”

Indraneel Dasgupta, professor of economics at the Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata, shares the viewpoint that there is no conclusive evidence to show these schemes have contributed to any form of social mobility, but have some effect in reducing poverty. He believes that the direct-cash transfers in the state, in its current forms, amount to a gross misallocation of funds which seeks to address consumption over long-term job creation. “West Bengal is actually spending far too large a proportion of its budget on these schemes supporting current consumption. The money has to come from somewhere, which is coming from cutting down expenditure on long-term capital formation and spending on essential governance facilities,” he says.

He adds: “The primary problem here, with schemes like Lakhsmir Bhandar, is the perception of autonomy being thought of as terms of cash in hand and not market opportunities. I think West Bengal has to come out of this cash transfer-based development strategy if it has to really generate serious, well-paying jobs for its younger people.”

Despite heavy criticism and dissection, Banerjee’s schemes find themselves at the nucleus of the party’s electoral promises for the fourth time, where the opposition, in attempts to discard them, has often adopted and foregrounded them. For the TMC supremo, in her most difficult battle since coming to power, the schemes transcend electoral strategy.

A shorter, edited version of this appears in print.

This article appeared in Outlook’s April 21 issue, 'I ran to bomb Iran, but instead I ran' which looked at the US-Israel war on Iran and what it means for families living through it and what is at stake in the states going to elections in the first phase