Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha
Title: Freebies or Rights: Rethinking India’s Social Policy
Author: Reetika Khera
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
The debate over welfare in India has increasingly been reduced to a convenient political binary. Governments announce food, pensions, employment guarantees, healthcare or other forms of support, and critics quickly label them “freebies”. Supporters, in turn, defend them as essential instruments of social justice. Reetika Khera’s Freebies or Rights: Rethinking India’s Social Policy brings into this debate a more fundamental question: Are these programmes merely acts of state generosity, or are they rights that enable citizens to live with dignity?
Khera, an economist known for her extensive work on social policy, approaches the subject through more than two decades of field research. Her concern is not simply with policy as it appears in government documents, but with how it works—or fails to work—in the everyday lives of ordinary Indians. The result is a book that combines empirical research with stories from villages, schools, anganwadis[1], government offices and field surveys.
The book’s scope is deliberately broad. It follows India’s welfare architecture from “cradle to grave”, examining anganwadis and school meals, the Public Distribution System, maternity benefits, pensions, public healthcare and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Together, these programmes represent some of the most important ways in which the Indian state intervenes in the lives of citizens, particularly those who have the least economic security.
The book refuses to treat welfare as an abstract contest between competing ideologies. Khera takes the discussion back to the ground. What does a pension mean to an elderly person with no regular income? What difference does a functioning school meal programme make to a child? How does access to subsidised food affect a poor household? What does MGNREGA mean when rural employment is uncertain? Such questions reveal the distance between political rhetoric and lived experience.
Interestingly, the word “freebie” itself comes under scrutiny. The term suggests something given away without obligation or social purpose. Khera challenges this framing by asking whether food, healthcare, education, and basic social security should instead be understood as components of citizenship. A democratic state, in this view, is not simply a provider of occasional relief but an institution with responsibilities towards its citizens.
Also, the book does not make a simplistic case for welfare. Its emphasis on implementation is important. A policy may look progressive on paper and still fail because of corruption, exclusion, inadequate infrastructure, bureaucratic delays or lack of awareness. Rights become meaningful only when citizens can actually access them. This distinction between legislation and delivery is central to understanding India’s welfare experience.
Khera’s field-based approach also helps puncture another familiar argument: that welfare programmes create dependency. The book asks whether social protection can instead expand freedom. An assured source of food, employment, healthcare or a modest pension can give people the security to make choices they otherwise could not afford. Welfare, therefore, may not diminish individual agency; under certain conditions, it can strengthen it.
The book’s larger contribution is to move the welfare debate away from slogans. It invites readers to consider inequality, citizenship and the responsibilities of the state in concrete terms. This makes Freebies or Rights particularly relevant at a time when social spending is frequently discussed through electoral calculations rather than through the experiences of those who depend on it.
Jean Drèze’s observation in the opening—that social policy is too important to be left to experts—captures the spirit of the book. Khera writes for citizens as much as for policymakers and academics. The book does not merely ask readers to accept a particular view of welfare; it equips them to ask better questions.
Freebies or Rights is a case for seeing social protection not as charity, but as part of the infrastructure of a democratic society. Its central message is both simple and consequential: dignity cannot be secured by economic growth alone. For millions of Indians, it also depends on whether the state can make basic rights real in everyday life.
[1] Government-run rural childcare centres in India
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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.
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