Despite the fact that social security programmes in India are not responses to structural adjustment but have a long history of their own. Social expenditure in India is nevertheless particularly vulnerable to budget cuts. The social sector is a major spending area of the government, comprising poverty reduction interventions, health, education, nutrition, social assistance and social welfare. Most departments of government are in some way responsible for spending under this broad head. The sector is highly divisible, thus facilitating incremental and piecemeal reductions in real expenditure. It has a weak political constituency, dominated by technical-expert persons, which the mass of evaluative research that has historically been critical of state interventionism has further weakened. Such work has been put to uses other than those originally intended - not to reform the sector but as justification to abolish major components of it entirely. However, since 1991, social sector expenditure has not declined as much as had been anticipated. Despite, or because of, its departmental pervasiveness, it is an extremely-perhaps uncuttable-low proportion of GNP: 2.4 per cent as compared with 6.5 per cent in Malaysia, 12.2 per cent in Botswana and 15-25 per cent in OECD countries. Even though social sector expenditure is also flawed by spatial patchiness, conflicting time trends in expenditure levels and composition and patterns specific to each component of welfare, cuts have been widely resisted and certain Indian states have increased their current debt in order to protect social expenditure. There is, fortunately, and necessarily, speculative literature predicting, sometimes with illustrations drawn from elsewhere, the likely outcomes of cuts in various types of social expenditure. But it is far too early for these to be evidence of the actual impact on social welfare is a long-term project of several decades.
Social security programmes in India encounter the issue of
