May 19, 2026 15:09 pm IST

Opinion | Why Freebies Work Brilliantly, Until They Suddenly Don't: A Tamil Nadu Paradox

Freebies work under three conditions - and fail when any one of those conditions is absent.

Aditya Sinha Aditya Sinha Analyst

In the 450s BC, the Athenian statesman Pericles introduced payment for jury service. Three obols per day, roughly a labourer's daily wage. The reform was genuinely progressive. Poor citizens who could not afford to forgo a day's income now had access to the courts and through them to the democratic machinery of the city. Within a generation, the payment had been extended across other civic functions, the amounts had grown, and Aristophanes was writing comedies about elderly Athenians whose entire social world had reorganised itself around collecting the daily fee. Aristotle, reviewing the arc of Athenian democracy, traced to this moment a particular degeneration: not in the justice of the original payment, but in what followed. A constituency had been created whose identity and income were tied to the continuation and expansion of the distribution. No subsequent Athenian politician managed to reduce it. The question had shifted, permanently, from whether jury pay was sound policy to whether citizens who received it deserved it. That is a very different and far more intractable argument.

India's political parties have spent years running a version of this experiment at scale and speed.

Six state elections between 2023 and 2026 have produced something close to a controlled dataset on the electoral returns to cash transfers. The results are neither the vindication that welfare economists hoped for nor the cautionary tale that fiscal conservatives predicted. They suggest, instead, a replicable set of conditions under which the freebie works, equally precise conditions under which it fails, and a philosophical problem that neither the Supreme Court nor the Finance Commissions' definitional struggles, nor any party manifesto has yet confronted honestly.

Start with the successes. In Madhya Pradesh in December 2023, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan launched the Ladli Behna scheme months before polling. Rs 1,250 per month to women in low-income households, disbursed at speed into 12.5 million bank accounts. The BJP won 163 of 230 seats. Women's turnout rose 2.2 percentage points over 2018. In Maharashtra a year later, the Ladki Bahin scheme at Rs 1,500 per month attracted........

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