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Author: Srivastava Mukul, Lecturer
Dept. of Social Work, Institute of Social Sciences, Agra
Social sector spending in India includes poverty reduction interventions, expenditures in the fields of health, education and nutrition and social assistance and social welfare. Most departments of government are in some way responsible for spending under this broad head. Despite the fact that social security programmes in India have a long history and are well established, social expenditure in India is nevertheless particularly vulnerable to budget cuts for a number of reasons. The sector is highly divisible and thus incremental and piecemeal reductions in real expenditure are possible. In addition, the political constituency that supports most social sector programmes is relatively weak and is dominated by technical expert patrons. Finally, the mass of evaluative researches which have historically been critical of state interventionism can be used not (as originally intented) to reform the sector, but to provide justifications to abolish major components entirely.
However, since 1991 social sector expenditure has not declined as much as had been anticipated. Despite its departmental pervasiveness it is an extremely critical sector - perhaps uncuttably. Even though social sector programmes are flawed with expenditure levels and by spatial patchiness and conflicting trends in expenditure and composition (Ravallion and Subbarao, 1992: Prabhu and Chatterjee: 1993), social sector cuts have been widely resisted in India and some Indian states have increased their current debt in order to protect social expenditure.
There is a speculative literature predicting, sometimes with illustrations drawn from elsewhere, the likely outcomes of cuts in various types of social expenditure (Mundle, 1992). However, it is far too early to obtain substantive evidence of the actual impact on social welfare of the economic reforms that have been made. The current economic reforms can also be seen to stem from a policy process set in motion entirely independently from external conditionalities; in the mid-eighties for instance, an Overdraft Regulation Scheme was imposed upon state governments, which set constraints upon total expenditure not unlike those of structural adjustment (Prabhu and Chatterjee: 1993). The long term performance of this part of the public sector is still a relevant issue for policy.
In this policy debate the role of the private sector in social sector provisioning is relatively neglected. The liberalisation process initiated in the mid 1980s, advanced by conditions of later situations and goaded further with the ratification of GATT, place a general confidence in the markets as a mechanism of resource allocation. However, should such markets be characterised by a failure of sorts which do not simply preempt existing state interventions, we are then in a realm of multiple second best policy choices. Under such circumstances, the capacity of the state to regulate market behaviour would require as much consideration as would the more mainstream approach to adjustment, which emphasises greater selectively, flexibility and self-targeting in social provisions (Ravallion and Subbarao, 1992).
The situation and the contextual perspective reflects the need for attempts to review the historical context of the social policies, the reforms proposed and attempted for the 1990s and as well for the 21st century and subsequently for the examination at great length of the key institutions regulating patterns of inclusion and exclusion-including both state and non-state institutions. If state institutions are to be compressed by means of expenditure cuts, non-state institutions will play a more important role in lieu of the former. The non-state is a complex social territory comprising not only of markets, but also of non-market institutions. Hence the policies must focus somewhat arbitrarily on two sorts of collective non-state, non-market institutions, one formal and the other informal, NGOs and poor households.
As the social sector is characterised by a multiplicity of specific policy approaches about which it is not possible to generalise regarding trends and outcomes - it will be necessary to be selective in coverage. Where possible, the different aspects of welfare should be covered by social security, health care and nutrition. While social security exemplifies a protective response to misfortune, the other two sectors exemplify a preventive response (Guhan: 1994).
