“When Free Money Stops Being Free: Mathematics Is Catching Up With India’s Freebie Funfare”, Swarajya, January 09, 2026
“In the race for short-term attention seeking, the mathematics of populism have always been lucrative in their simplicity: promise immediate relief, win elections, worry about payment later.
For the last few years, this formula has dominated India’s electoral landscape in which state after state has been transformed into laboratories of competitive welfare maximalism. Yet political mathematics, unlike its counterpart rhetoric, eventually demands reconciliation in which both words and numbers need to add up on both sides of the equation.
Maharashtra government’s recent decision to render approximately 6.7 million women ineligible for its flagship Ladki Bahin Yojana—a scheme largely credited for a remarkable post-Lok Sabha elections comeback in the state—represents something more consequential than routine bureaucratic course correction. It is one of the earliest arrivals of a fiscal reckoning that populist politics has long postponed but is no longer in a position to defer……”
Read full article at swarajyamag.com
