Criticism against West Bengal’s budget misses its blend of growth, welfare

The raft of welfare measures introduced by the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government in its Budget for the 2024-2025 financial year, rolled out on February 8, has been assailed by both the Left front and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as stratagems to buy votes, or as indications of directionlessness.

The Budget is certainly not aimless, though it has the elections in mind, or, as described by BJP Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari in a sectarian tirade, dismissive of sections of the people. Let’s recap.

Some existing schemes, such as the Lakshmir Bhandar (the monthly payment made to women as compensation for unpaid domestic work) have been enhanced; new schemes have been announced for fisherfolk, weavers, and artisans; the dearness allowance for government employees has been hiked by 4 per cent; salaries for civic volunteers, who complement the police, have been raised; and, a shape has been given to already pledged benefits, like the government making good on payments frozen by the Centre and grant of land deeds to tea-garden workers.

The downside is that some groups, like farmers, and some regions, like the Sunderbans, have no new benefits. More seriously, the fiscal deficit is pegged to rise for the third year in a row. An evaluation of the entire exercise must be undertaken conceptually as well as in terms of West Bengal’s recent performance on economic and social indicators.

First, the criticism that the Budget is designed to buy votes is vapid. One of the principal tasks of governments is to provide the means to live well, or adequately, by judiciously implementing policies to promote economic development and providing social security.

The latter is not just a legitimate tool of governance, in a welfare state, it is a duty. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s mocking gibes about the Opposition providing or promising ‘rewris’, a confection used as a simile for subsidies, is not worth dignifying with a riposte, because he and governments run by his party in many states use them to garner votes, particularly while campaigning for elections, as in Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan last year.

But there is a bigger point. Market fundamentalists are always eager to decry the provision of subsidies to the poor as ‘bad politics’, opposed to ‘good economics’, but their arguments are framed in a ‘liberalisation’ perspective that sees economic growth and the market as the only legitimate way of promoting well-being, despite stacks of evidence that a rising tide does not lift all boats.

Moreover, they do not apply the basic principle to subsidies provided to set up industrial units. Their arguments about job-creation hardly wash in the context of jobless growth. It is difficult to see why agriculture, the economic activity that provides around 45 per cent of employment in India, while manufacturing provides around 12 per cent and services around 25 per cent, should not receive support.

West Bengal’s GSDP grew at 10.76 per cent and 8.41 per cent in 2021-2022 and 2022-2023, while Gujarat’s grew at 8.3 per cent in 2022-2023, admittedly from a higher baseline. So, apart from giving out doles, the West Bengal government is obviously doing something right. It has achieved a healthy rise in exports, pegged at almost 3 per cent of India’s total.

But West Bengal’s real success, tied to the state’s welfarist push, has been in the reduction of multidimensional poverty and good progress on critical human development indices. Between 2016 and 2021, Gujarat reduced the percentage of people living under multidimensional poverty by 6.8 to 11.7, while West Bengal reduced it by 9.4 to 11.9, occupying a middle-of-the-table position.

West Bengal reduced the percentage of undernourished people from 33.6 per cent to 27.3 per cent between 2016 and 2021. In the same period, Gujarat reduced this percentage from 41.37 to 38.09. West Bengal has outperformed Gujarat in areas like sanitation and the provision of clean drinking water.

By 2021, poverty intensity in Gujarat fell to 43.25 per cent, while it fell to 42.35 in Bengal. So, whether the Mamata Banerjee-led government has electoral calculations in mind, it has clearly found the right mix of growth and welfare to move ahead. Certainly, West Bengal has a distance still to go.

(Suhit K Sen is author of ‘The Paradox of Populism: The Indira Gandhi Years, 1966-1977’.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.