The manifestos released by the DMK and AIADMK for the upcoming Assembly election are exercises in competitive populism. The AIADMK has given 297 assurances; so, the DMK did 517. Since handouts directed at women are reputed to have swung several recent state elections across India, that’s the accent in both programmes. While both parties tip their hat to the Dravidian Model of social justice and the new-fangled macro goal of a trillion-dollar economy by 2030, it’s the DMK, the ruling party, that pays more attention to ways and means and programme design. The AIADMK’s manifesto in comparison just throws the sink at it.
As has been the recent fashion, both parties have included specific giveaways that they hope will attract headlines and thus help to brand their pitch in the election campaign. The AIADMK went first, with a bouquet of direct benefits: a one-time handout of Rs 10,000 for every family, monthly assistance of Rs 2,000 for female heads of households, free refrigerators for all rice-ration card holders, three free cooking gas cylinders per year and 1kg of pulses and 1 litre of cooking oil every month. The party’s hope is that its pitch will be remembered for the refrigerator. But it’s more likely that the three free LPG cylinders will be found more useful right now due to the current choke on the Strait of Hormuz.
Ruling party DMK’s response was to match the consumerist appeal by promising free coupons worth Rs 8,000 to buy any household gadget, not just fridges, and to expand its current schemes: Monthly aid to women under the Kalaignar Magalir Urimai Thogai scheme will be doubled to Rs 2,000; pension for senior citizens, widows, and unmarried women over 50 will go from Rs 1,200 to Rs 2,000 per month; and the free breakfast for students will be extended up to Class 8. There will be a monthly stipend of Rs 1,500 for five lakh educated youth undergoing skill training under the Naan Mudhalvan scheme. And there is a pledge of free laptops for 35 lakh college students.
Arguments against freebies abound; if well-designed, they can unlock wider second- and third-order benefits besides winning the vote of the primary beneficiary. The classic example of this, a landmark in India’s welfare history, was CN Annadurai’s promise of 3 padis of rice for one rupee in 1967. Although it did weather implementation difficulties, it became a milestone for food security measures and paved the way for NT Rama Rao’s two-rupee rice scheme in Andhra Pradesh and indeed the Prime Minister’s Garib Kalyan Yojana.
Similarly, free meals at school have universally helped to boost enrolment and improve learning outcomes. Even consumer giveaways like the colour TVs promised by the DMK in 2006, which were scoffed at then, had unanticipated social benefits: Studies found that women exposed to cable TV programming became less accepting of domestic violence and less desirous of only sons.
If freebie schemes must be promised, they must be designed well and have the potential for secondary and tertiary social goods, as the DMK’s extension of the free school breakfast certainly does. And then, the administration must be capable of implementing well. The free laptop scheme of the Samajwadi Party (2012) in UP failed because 15 lakh laptops were procured, but only 6.1 lakh were distributed. The rest suffered warehouse decay because the Chief Minister wanted to distribute them personally. By which time the batteries failed.