Welfare policies and direct benefit transfers have been at the heart of India’s political marketplace for several decades but the longer-term history of welfare in India is surprisingly little known. Louise Tillin’s new book Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2025) recovers a history that is crucial for understanding the current juncture of welfare politics and political economy in India. Traversing more than a century of welfare development from the late colonial period to the present-day, the book asks why India has ended up with a small protected formal sector workforce shielded by social security and protection against retrenchment, and a much larger population that labours informally and does not enjoy such protections. It examines why India’s model of industrialisation failed to provide an engine for mass employment or welfare state development, and why the focus of policy efforts has shifted over the last fifty years from employment generation to the rise of ‘direct benefits’ which subsidise precarious livelihoods.

Louise Tillin is Professor of Politics at King’s India Institute, King’s College London. She is the author of numerous books including Deconstructing India’s Democracy: Essays in Honour of James Manor (Orient Blackswan, 2025) edited with Rob Jenkins; The Politics of Poverty Reduction in India: The UPA Government from 2004 to 2014 (Orient Blackswan, 2020) co-authored with James Chiriyankandath, Diego Maiorano and James Manor; Indian Federalism (Oxford University Press, 2019), Politics of Welfare: Comparisons across States (Oxford University Press, 2015), edited with Rajeshwari Deshpande and KK Kailash; Remapping India: New States and their Political Origins (Hurst & Co/Oxford University Press, 2013) and has published in many academic journals. Since 2013, she has been the co-organiser of a series of conferences on India’s Political Economy. She holds degrees from the University of Cambridge, University of Pennsylvania and Institute of Development Studies, Sussex.