Calling impactful welfare schemes ‘freebies’ an insult to Constitutional mandate, YSR Congress tells SC

Calling the Union government’s increasing debt alarming, the party pointed out the decreasing share of taxes of the states in the central taxes, contrary to the recommendation by the Finance Commission.

The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) led by MK Stalin and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) led by Arvind Kejriwal have filed similar pleas in the Supreme Court.

YSRCP defends welfare schemes

The YSRCP stated that a welfare scheme providing a free service is introduced with an intent to secure social order and economic justice under Article 38 to minimise the inequalities in income, status, facilities and opportunities.

“Without due regard to the objectives of some of the government programmes, the Union government has chosen to refer to them as freebies,” the affidavit read.

Citing the example of Jagananna Ammavodi — a school enrollment scheme under which ₹15,000 is provided per year to the mother of a school student if he or she meets the 75 percent attendance criteria — the YSRCP argued that it encourages poor households to educate their children.

“Painting the programmes of vast socio-economic importance that are being implemented to alleviate the prevailing distress with the same brush is, to say the least, an insult to the Constitutional mandate,” the party stated in its plea.

The YSRCP also noted that the expenditure on education, health, and agriculture is recognised as revenue expenditure because no tangible asset is created.

Need of the hour

Justifying its welfare initiatives as the need of the hour due to the “policy paralysis” of the previous government, the YSRCP took a swipe at the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), which was in power from 2014 to 2019. 

It said the TDP’s rule “resulted in many crucial sectors such as education, health, and agriculture demonstrating poor performance.” 

As per the YSRCP, the 2014 Andhra Pradesh bifurcation caused widespread economic deprivation. The state was suffering from poor enrollment in primary education and as many as 76 percent of farmers were in debt.

Nazki, in his petition, reminded the Union government that even 2019 economics Nobel Laureates Abhijeet Bannerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer noted that social welfare schemes have positive outcomes if they directly reach the beneficiaries.

As recent as last week, the state government credited ₹694 crore into the accounts of around 11 lakh beneficiaries under Jagananna Vidya Deevena, a fee-reimbursement scheme for impoverished students enrolled in higher education.

The party also claimed that it had successfully implemented several welfare schemes like improving the overall infrastructure of 56,555 government schools, waiving loans of women’s cooperative societies, and giving free electricity to farmers and socially downtrodden groups for nine hours a day.