Impacts of a partial welfare reform on targeting and political competition

Over the past decade, India’s BJP-led national government has undertaken various reforms to welfare programs, aiming to reduce the scope for local officials to manipulate beneficiary selection or divert funds. Nevertheless state and local governments retained considerable discretion over beneficiary selection and the local delivery of central government funded welfare benefits, and have maintained exclusive control over state-funded programs. We use longitudinal household survey data from the state of West Bengal to evaluate the effects of these reforms on pro-poor targeting of welfare programs, and political competition between the BJP and the TMC, the incumbent political party in the state. We find that welfare programs were better targeted toward poorer and socially disadvantaged households in the period 2014–2018 than in 2010–2013. However the welfare reforms do not explain why the BJP’s vote share increased, as its electoral gains from the new nationwide programs were outweighed by their losses, stemming from the increased support for the TMC from recipients of new state and pre-existing benefits.