The ninth Union Budget presented by Nirmala Sitharaman once again places its faith in growth through public investment, fiscal discipline and long-term capacity building. From the perspective of India’s poor and ultra-poor—particularly women, children, the landless and unskilled labour—the budget signals intent but falls short on urgency. Its central promise lies in future gains, while present vulnerabilities remain inadequately addressed.
The increase in capital expenditure to ₹12.2 lakh crore is rightly projected as a pro-poor move. Infrastructure spending is among the few policy tools capable of generating employment for landless and unskilled workers who depend on informal, seasonal and daily-wage labour. Yet experience shows that such employment is often short-lived, contractor-driven and unevenly distributed. In many districts, large infrastructure projects rely increasingly on machinery rather than labour, limiting job creation for the poorest. Without explicit labour-intensity norms or convergence with employment guarantee mechanisms, the capacity of high capital expenditure to stabilise incomes for the landless remains uncertain.
Health allocations of around ₹1.05 lakh crore appear reassuring on paper, but the lived reality of public health delivery tells a more sobering story. Despite flagship insurance and primary healthcare programmes, poor households continue to incur high out-of-pocket expenditure. In many rural and peri-urban areas, primary health centres face chronic shortages of doctors, diagnostics and essential medicines. Women often travel long distances for maternal care, while migrant and unregistered workers frequently find themselves excluded from health insurance coverage due to documentation barriers. Increased allocations, without addressing these structural weaknesses, risk reinforcing a system in which public schemes exist but remain functionally inaccessible to those who need them most.
The story is similar in education. Allocations of about ₹1.39 lakh crore reaffirm commitment, yet children of landless and unskilled workers continue to experience high dropout rates, particularly at the secondary level. Seasonal migration disrupts schooling, and digital learning initiatives have failed to reach households without devices, connectivity or adult support. Despite multiple scholarship and child welfare schemes, delays in disbursement and complex eligibility requirements often dilute impact. For adolescent girls in poor households, economic stress still pushes education behind unpaid care work or early marriage—outcomes that higher budgetary numbers alone cannot reverse.
Women’s livelihoods receive attention through initiatives such as SHE Marts and the continued emphasis on creating “Lakhpati Didis.” While the intent is commendable, past experience with self-help groups and livelihood missions suggests caution. Many women-led enterprises struggle not due to a lack of effort, but because of limited market access, delayed payments, weak procurement linkages and insufficient working capital. In several states, self-help group members remain trapped in low-return activities, recycling small loans without meaningful income growth. Without addressing these bottlenecks, new livelihood platforms risk replicating the same structural constraints under a new label.
More broadly, the limited effectiveness of public and social schemes stems from persistent design and delivery failures. Fragmentation across departments, exclusion errors in beneficiary identification, and an over-reliance on digital platforms have left many of the poorest households—especially migrant labourers, single women and the homeless—outside the effective reach of welfare systems. Benefits are often delayed, partial or unpredictable, reducing their capacity to smooth consumption or protect against shocks. The budget does little to acknowledge, let alone correct, these systemic weaknesses.
Most strikingly, the budget offers no meaningful short-term relief. There is no expansion of direct cash transfers, no additional consumption support and no targeted safety net for landless and unskilled workers facing volatile employment and rising living costs. Growth generated through infrastructure, education and enterprise development will take time to reach households. Hunger, wage loss and indebtedness, however, are immediate realities.
In essence, the budget strengthens the scaffolding of future growth while underestimating the fragility of those at the bottom. For households earning ₹5–8 lakh a year, delayed benefits may be tolerable. For the landless poor, women-headed households and families with young children, it is a precarious wager. A genuinely inclusive budget would have combined long-term investment with meaningful reform of existing schemes and immediate protection for those whose lives are shaped not by projections, but by daily survival.
---
Comments