The Rights-Based Approach to Social Policy in India: Innovations, Advances and Setbacks

from introduction: " Since the 1990s, many Southern polities have changed the architecture and expanded the scope of their welfare regimes. The ‘social turn’ in development strategy over the last two decades, an overarching theme of this volume, suggested the possibility of a postneoliberal era. This chapter explores one of the most striking and contentious dimensions of these changes in recent years: the establishment of a rights-based approach to social policy in the world’s largest democracy. Starting in 2004, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), led by the Indian National Congress, enacted a series of measures to expand the civil liberties and participatory opportunities as well as economic security and social entitlements of its most disempowered citizens. These ranged from a right to information, work and education to food and land. Yet the UPA also introduced new digital technologies and cash transfer programs in many realms in 2009, whose footprint expanded since 2014 under the auspices of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The new ruling dispensation, dominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has sought to undermine rights-based entitlements."