Modi's Subjects: How Welfare Politics Became a Tool of Permanent Dependency

On 1 July 2026, an opinion column in ThePrint argued that the Indian government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spent a decade constructing, by deliberate design, a class of citizens who exist in a zone of permanent uncertainty — people whose access to a minimum livelihood depends on the continued goodwill of the state rather than on rights they can enforce. The piece, written from an Indian opposition vantage point, lands a sharper claim than the usual complaint about welfare delivery: the architecture itself, the column argues, is the policy.

This is the argument worth taking seriously. For ten years, New Delhi has pushed cash into bank accounts tied to Aadhaar, expanded the Public Distribution System through the One Nation One Ration Card scheme, run periodic top-ups to women account-holders, and stitched together a dense lattice of conditional benefits — housing, gas, electricity, pensions — each with its own eligibility regime, each revocable by administrative discretion. The aggregate result, the column contends, is not a citizenry newly armed with purchasing power but a population that has been taught to keep asking.

The architecture of dependence

The mechanism is not new, but its scale is. India's direct benefit transfer architecture, anchored by the JAM Trinity — Jan Dhan accounts, Aadhaar numbers, and mobile telephony — has moved hundreds of millions of payments into accounts that the state can see, freeze, or condition. A late-2025 review by the Reserve Bank of India noted that the share of central-government welfare delivery routed through DBT had crossed 318 schemes, covering roughly 920 million beneficiaries by the end of fiscal year 2024-25. The state can now, in principle, reach a household in a Tier-5 town within seventy-two hours.

That reach is presented as empowerment: the banked poor, the leak-proof pipeline, the end of the middleman. ThePrint's reading is the inverse. When eligibility for a subsidy is redefined by a notification, when biometric mismatches freeze rations, when a single Aadhaar-seeded failure can collapse a stack of entitlements, the citizen does not become freer. The citizen becomes a supplicant whose life is administered, and whose dignity is contingent on a clerk's verification.

The political payoff is obvious and is the column's core claim. A voter who depends on a regime for the next transfer is a voter who will weigh the cost of dissent. The state need not threaten; it only needs to administer.

The case the government makes

It deserves to be stated in its strongest form, because it is the case the wire press rarely delivers at full strength. The Modi government's record on financial inclusion is real. Jan Dhan accounts, of which there are now more than 560 million, have given a formal banking identity to households that operated entirely in cash a decade ago. The PDS, post-ONORC, allows a migrant worker in Surat to draw a ration quota accrued in Odisha. Ujjwala expanded clean cooking fuel coverage to roughly 100 million households.

Officials at NITI Aayog have argued, in their own published assessments, that DBT reduced fungible leakage by an estimated ₹2.7 lakh crore between 2014 and 2024 — savings they frame as proof that the architecture works for the poor, not against them. On the government telling, the citizen is a customer of a state that has finally learned to deliver.

ThePrint's piece does not deny any of this. Its complaint is structural, not operational. A bank account and a clean LPG connection are not the same as enforceable rights, and an architecture that delivers them by administrative grace can un-deliver them by administrative fiat. The column is not anti-welfare. It is anti-discretion.

What the counter-frame misses

Opposition commentary in India, including the kind that runs in ThePrint's opinion pages, has a habit of reading the BJP's welfare state as a uniquely cynical project. It is worth noting that the Congress's MGNREGA, launched in 2005 and still India's largest guaranteed-employment scheme, set the template for the very conditional-citizen relationship ThePrint now critiques. The Modi government has not invented welfare dependency; it has industrialised it. The MGNREGA budget was held at roughly ₹86,000 crore for 2025-26 even as PM-KISAN and other top-up transfers expanded; the trade-off is itself a design choice about which subjects the state wishes to keep close.

The deeper point, which the column gestures at without belabouring, is that a welfare architecture in which the citizen cannot easily say no is not a welfare architecture at all. It is a patronage network with a digital backbone.

Stakes and what is contested

If the trajectory holds — and the 2024 general election, in which the BJP returned to power with a reduced but working majority, suggested it will — India is converging on a model in which the line between citizen and client is administrative rather than constitutional. ThePrint's argument is that this is not a side effect of delivery efficiency. It is the design. The mai-baap sarkar, the column observes, is not a slogan coined by the opposition; it is the operational reality the state has built, in Aadhaar seed by Aadhaar seed.

What remains genuinely contested, even on the evidence, is whether the same architecture produces different outcomes under a different political coalition. The Congress has not promised to dismantle DBT; it has promised to expand it. The structural critique, in other words, is bipartisan in implication even if the column does not say so. That is the conversation worth having next.

Monexus framed this column as a structural critique of welfare design rather than a partisan attack, treating ThePrint's argument as a serious contribution to a debate most wire coverage has flattened into delivery metrics.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/ThePrintIndia
• https://t.me/thePrintIndia