In March 2021, Thulam Saravanan, a legislative Assembly candidate for the Madurai South constituency in Tamil Nadu, offered extraordinary sops such as ₹1 crore and a car worth ₹20 lakh for each household, a robot for every homemaker, ₹1 crore to youth looking to start a business, a 100-day trip to the moon, a 300-feet artificial glacier to keep people cool etc. He lost the polls. Nevertheless, his promises weren’t far off from those of the major political parties in power. In promising freebies, parody has increasingly meshed with reality.
All political parties offer freebies now. In 1967, DMK founder C.N. Annadurai promised a ₹4.5 kg bag of rice at ₹1 if his party was elected to power. His campaign, for “three measures of rice for ₹1”, saw the party sweep the elections. The party could provide just 1 kg of rice for ₹1 instead. Once launched, the scheme continued to grow, with ₹146 crore allocated in July 2020 to provide 5 kg of free rice per person to all PMKAY cardholders in Tamil Nadu.
Over time, freebies expanded beyond rice, to gas stoves, colour TVs, laptops, payments for household work etc. Spreading beyond Tamil Nadu, the trend has caught on in other States as well – the Delhi government has notably offered water and electricity (up to a certain limit) free for the city’s voters; the Himachal Pradesh government is offering locals free power upto 125 units, along with free water in villages and a 50% discount in bus fares for women; in Assam, the State government has announced direct and indirect cash benefit schemes worth ₹6,000 crore impacting nine lakh beneficiaries. This begs the question – has an entitlement mentality been encouraged, creating a cradle-to-grave welfare state?
