How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India---Prerna Singh

 

 What determines the efficacy of social welfare policy and the nature of development outcomes? Why do some politico-geographic entities succeed in formulating and successfully implementing effective development policy and others fail? Enormous amount of academic effort has flowed down these channels of enquiry over the years. It’s culture, said some, it’s geography and disease vectors, said others; state institutions are critical, asserted many and the colonial experience is a major determinant, insisted still others.

To this fascinating debate, Political Scientist and Assistant Professor at Brown University in the US, Prerna Singh, has made a thought provoking contribution in her book How Solidarity Works for Welfare: Subnationalism and Social Development in India.  

Professor Singh frames the question in the context of India and asks why the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu have made significant progress in the welfare space, while UP, in particular, and Bihar and Rajasthan, to a considerable degree and for very long, failed to do so. The state is the natural unit of study as it is the entity primarily responsible for formulation and implementation of welfare policy. Studying the experience of Indian states automatically does away with much of the problem of different regime types, social-political-legal institutions and differential colonial experience. Within the same nation state, wide regional variations in development outcomes need to be investigated and Prof. Singh does so in depth and with rigour.

The author’s primary contention is that a strong sense of social solidarity -- ‘an identification with a self- governing homeland’ -- and a sense of ‘we-ness’, in effect a vibrant and strong subnationalism  within a state, has two significant consequences: it promotes amongst the ruling elite a commitment to social welfare and so leads to appropriate policies being espoused by the state, and secondly, it leads to public involvement in and monitoring of the ground level implementation of those policies. The result of this is a major improvement in development outcomes, especially in education and health -- the parameters she has specifically focused on.

The author examines the emergence of subnationalism in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, its absence in UP and its delayed and slow evolution in Bihar and Rajasthan, and maps it to the health and education outcomes in these states. The story of the emergence, or otherwise, of subnationalism in  the states studied is a fascinating dive into 19^th and 20^th century history.

In Tamil Nadu and Kerala, the dominance of a small elite, the rise of a challenger elite using symbols of subnationalism, the gradual spread and internalization of the feeling of subnationalism amongst the masses and the consequences for welfare policies make a remarkable narrative. The absence in UP of a state-wide subnationalism, the rise and consolidation instead of ethnic/religious identities, and the focus on national, rather than state level political issues takes away from any public or state focus on welfare issues of UP. The consequences for welfare outcomes -- especially in health and education -- are there for all to see.

Rajasthan and Bihar did see, very late and slow, the emergence of a constrained subnationalism and the results have gone as expected; there have been improvements in welfare outcomes, limited but significant.

There is also a statistical analysis and those who can validate the empirical measures of subnationalism will find an interesting and expectedly significant positive relationship with social development outcomes across Indian states over time.

The author does establish a convincing correlation between social cohesiveness at the state level and welfare outcomes in the cases where detailed studies have been provided, but even there the reader is left with questions. The correlation may be fairly evident, but the actual mechanisms of causations seem a trifle blurred. But then, there are never any final and complete explanations in the social sciences. There are only interesting and intriguing propositions and the book does offer some very exciting ones.

Happy reading.