Social Policy, Planning and Social Development I: Social Policy, its Concept, Goals, Scope, Context and Models and their Applicability in India; the Evolution of Social Policies and their Implementation for Marginalised and Vulnerable Sections; and the Process of Policy Formulation under a Changing Political Scenario

Harold Wilensky and Charles Lebeaux (Industrial Society and Social Welfare, 1958) distinguished two conceptions of welfare. In the residual conception, welfare institutions come into play only when the normal channels, the family and the market, break down; help is temporary, targeted and often stigmatising. In the institutional conception, welfare services are a normal, first-line function of modern industrial society, provided as of right. Richard Titmuss (Social Policy: An Introduction, 1974) described three models. The residual welfare model holds that the state should intervene only temporarily when family and market fail. The industrial achievement-performance model, sometimes called the "handmaiden" model, holds that social needs should be met on the basis of merit, work performance and productivity. The institutional redistributive model sees social welfare as a major integrated institution providing universal services outside the market on the principle of need, and redistributing resources towards equality.

Gøsta Esping-Andersen (The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, 1990) classified welfare states by decommodification, the degree to which people can maintain a livelihood without relying on the market, and by their effect on stratification. Liberal regimes (the United States, the United Kingdom) offer modest, means-tested benefits and encourage the market; conservative or corporatist regimes (Germany, France) tie benefits to occupation and status through social insurance and support the traditional family; social democratic regimes (the Scandinavian countries) provide universal, generous benefits and promote equality. Applied to India, none fits neatly. The Constitution's directive principles express an institutional, redistributive aspiration; much practice has been residual and targeted, through below-poverty-line schemes; social insurance on the conservative pattern reaches mainly formal-sector workers, a minority of the workforce; and since 2005 a rights-based turn has created legal entitlements to information, work, education and food. Ian Gough and Geof Wood described countries like India as "informal security regimes", in which family, community and patron-client ties still provide much of people's security.

Indian social policy has passed through several phases. The Constitution (1950) laid the base: fundamental rights against discrimination and untouchability, directive principles on livelihood, education, public assistance, health and the welfare of weaker sections, and special provisions for Scheduled Castes and Tribes. In the planning era, policy was expressed through the Five-Year Plans, with welfare treated as a residual sector and faith placed in growth and community development. Sectoral policies followed: the National Policy on Education (1968 and 1986, revised in 1992), the National Policy for Children (1974), the National Health Policy (1983), the Special Component Plan for Scheduled Castes and the Tribal Sub-Plan in the 1970s. After liberalisation in 1991, policy combined fiscal restraint with targeted anti-poverty programmes and, from the late 1990s, sector policies for particular groups: the National Policy on Older Persons (1999), the National Population Policy (2000), the National Policy for the Empowerment of Women (2001), the National Health Policy (2002) and the National Policy for Persons with Disabilities (2006).

From 2005 a rights-based turn created justiciable entitlements: the Right to Information Act 2005, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005 (later named after Mahatma Gandhi), the Forest Rights Act 2006, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 and the National Food Security Act 2013, several of them shaped by civil society campaigns and by Supreme Court orders in the right to food case (PUCL v Union of India, from 2001). Later policy has included the National Policy for Children (2013), the National Health Policy (2017), the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act (2016), the National Education Policy (2020), and a large expansion of direct benefit transfers linked to Aadhaar. Implementation for marginalised and vulnerable sections has relied on reservations, special plans (now development action plans for Scheduled Castes and Tribes), scholarships, protective laws and targeted schemes, and has been limited by exclusion errors in targeting, weak delivery, leakage, lack of awareness and the discretion of local officials. Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky's Implementation (1973) showed how policies fail through the many decision points between intention and delivery, and Michael Lipsky's Street-Level Bureaucracy (1980) showed that front-line workers, teachers, police and welfare officials effectively make policy through the discretion they exercise.

The determinants of social policy include the constitution and law, the ideology of the ruling party, economic conditions and fiscal space, interest groups and social movements, public opinion and the media, research and evidence, the bureaucracy, the judiciary (in India, especially through public interest litigation), federal relations, and international commitments and agencies. The process is commonly described as a policy cycle: problem identification; agenda setting; formulation of alternatives; adoption or legitimation; implementation; evaluation; and revision or termination. John Kingdon (Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, 1984) described agenda setting through three streams, problems, policies and politics, which flow largely independently until they come together and open a "policy window", often seized by policy entrepreneurs.

Approaches to policy formulation differ in their view of rationality and power. The rational-comprehensive approach identifies all alternatives, assesses all consequences and chooses the best, an ideal rarely possible. Charles Lindblom's incremental approach ("The Science of Muddling Through", 1959) holds that policymakers make small, successive adjustments to existing policy through bargaining, which is realistic and stable but conservative. Amitai Etzioni's mixed scanning (1967) combines a broad scan of fundamental choices with detailed incremental decisions. Elite theory holds that policy reflects the preferences of a ruling elite; group theory sees it as the equilibrium among competing interest groups; public choice theory analyses policy as the outcome of self-interested behaviour by voters, politicians and bureaucrats; and participatory approaches seek to involve affected people directly, through consultations, social audits and people's plans. A changing political scenario affects all of this: the shift from single-party dominance to coalitions and back, the deepening of federalism and the role of states in welfare, liberalisation and fiscal pressures, the rise of civil society and judicial activism, the use of technology in delivery, and competitive welfare promises in elections. Each alters who sets the agenda and whose voices count.