Who Provides Social Protection in India? A Closer Look at State and Non-State Actors

When a daily wage worker in a small town falls ill, who steps in to help? Sometimes it is the government through a health card, sometimes a neighbour with a loan, sometimes a temple kitchen with a free meal, and sometimes an NGO running a clinic nearby. This patchwork is what scholars call social protection, and in a country as diverse and unequal as India, it is rarely provided by one actor alone. Understanding who provides it, and on what terms, tells us a lot about how vulnerability is managed and how power is distributed in society.

What we mean by social protection
The role of the state as the welfare provider
Redistribution and poverty alleviation
Why state provision is uneven
Non-state actors and informal support
Family and kinship networks
Community and religious institutions
Civil society organisations and NGOs
Public-private partnerships and the influence of privatisation
Globalisation and the changing role of the state
How the layers fit together

Social protection refers to policies and programmes that reduce poverty and vulnerability by ensuring access to income, food, healthcare, housing and basic services, especially during life-cycle risks like childbirth, illness, unemployment, disability and old age. The International Labour Organization classifies India’s system into contributory schemes for formal workers and non-contributory social assistance for the poor, but in practice, support flows through multiple, often overlapping, channels.

Broadly, providers fall into three buckets: the state (central, state and local governments), non-state actors (families, communities, religious institutions, NGOs and private businesses) and hybrid arrangements like public-private partnerships. Each plays a distinct role, and each has visible strengths and equally visible blind spots.

The role of the state as the welfare provider

The Indian state is constitutionally committed to acting as a welfare provider. The Directive Principles of State Policy direct the government to secure a social order that minimises inequalities in income and opportunity, provides public assistance during unemployment, sickness and old age, and ensures humane working conditions and maternity relief. These are not legally enforceable, but they shape policy in important ways.

In practice, the state operates as the largest provider of social protection. Government social security and welfare spending forms a substantial portion of central, state and local budgets, with Aadhaar increasingly used to deliver benefits. The system has two prongs: tax-funded social assistance (cash transfers, food rations, employment guarantees) and contributory schemes tied to formal employment such as the Employees’ Provident Fund and Employees’ State Insurance.

Redistribution and poverty alleviation

A welfare state’s core function is to redistribute resources from those who have more to those who have less. According to an analysis by the Observer Research Foundation, such corrective redistribution is essential not just for the survival of marginalised sections but also for the political legitimacy of the modern state. When large sections of citizens feel abandoned, the legitimacy of democracy itself weakens.

India has built an extensive scaffolding to perform this redistributive role. Programmes like the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the Public Distribution System (PDS), the National Social Assistance Programme for pensions, mid-day meals, the Integrated Child Development Services and Ayushman Bharat together form one of the largest social safety nets in the world. The Center for the Advanced Study of India notes that rights-based legislation in the 2000s, covering the right to food, work and education, made social welfare central to public policy.

Why state provision is uneven

The state’s reach is impressive on paper but patchy in practice. India has over 400 schemes targeting different groups, run by multiple ministries, with little coordination across the Centre and states. The result is fragmentation, duplication and gaps. A World Bank assessment cited in the same analysis found that only about 22 per cent of informal workers, who form the backbone of the economy, were covered under any form of social protection.

Performance also varies sharply across states. Research by political scientist Atul Kohli shows that redistributive outcomes depend heavily on political ideology, bureaucratic capacity and party structure. Kerala and Tamil Nadu, with stronger investments in health and education, perform better on poverty alleviation than several Hindi-belt states, where narrow political bases and patron-client politics have limited welfare reach.

Non-state actors and informal support

The state has never been the only provider of protection, and in many parts of the country, it is not even the main one. Long before formal welfare schemes existed, families, caste networks, religious endowments and community institutions cushioned individuals against life’s shocks. They continue to do so today, often invisibly.

Family and kinship networks

The family remains the first and most reliable safety net for most people. Joint families, extended kin and marriage networks pool incomes, share housing, care for the elderly and the sick, raise children together and provide loans without paperwork. For women in particular, the family is often the only source of post-divorce or post-widowhood support, given the absence of universal pensions or unemployment benefits.

However, this dependence has a darker side. When the family is unsafe, controlling or discriminatory, women, children and elders have very few exit options. Reliance on kinship also reproduces caste and gender hierarchies, since the protection one receives often depends on the network one is born into.

Community and religious institutions

Caste associations, religious trusts, gurdwara langars, temple charities, church-run schools and madrasas have historically delivered food, education, healthcare and emergency aid. Religious endowments in particular have funded hospitals, orphanages and old-age homes for centuries. Faith-based organisations continue to play a substantial role in welfare, alongside community-based organisations and resident welfare associations.

These networks are responsive and rooted, but they are also bounded. Help is typically extended along lines of religion, caste or locality, which means those outside the dominant community, including migrants, inter-caste couples and minorities, may be left out.

Civil society organisations and NGOs

Modern civil society includes professional NGOs, advocacy groups, self-help groups and social movements. They run anganwadis under government contracts, deliver maternal health services, organise informal workers, support survivors of domestic violence and push for policy change. UNICEF India works alongside civil society organisations, academic institutions and think tanks to strengthen welfare delivery for women and children.

NGOs were especially visible during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when state systems struggled to reach migrants and informal workers. A study by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements documented how non-state actors organised relief, food and transport during each lockdown, often filling gaps left by official systems.

That said, the NGO sector is uneven. Some organisations have become deeply accountable to local communities; others are more accountable to donors and government funders than to the people they serve. Treating NGOs as a uniform good obscures these differences.

Public-private partnerships and the influence of privatisation

Since the 1991 economic liberalisation, India has increasingly relied on private actors to deliver services that were once seen as public responsibilities. Public-private partnerships (PPPs) bring together government funding and regulation with private capacity in delivery, especially in health, education and infrastructure.

The Chiranjeevi Yojana in Gujarat, which contracted private obstetricians to provide institutional deliveries for poor women, is a frequently cited example. A review in the Lancet Regional Health journal notes that such PPPs can extend coverage where the public sector is thin, but they are not automatically effective. Their success depends on clear goals, careful contract design, and quality monitoring. The same review observed that in Bangladesh’s Urban Primary Health Care Project, an excessive emphasis on cost recovery undermined the project’s stated goal of serving the most vulnerable, a cautionary lesson for India.

Globalisation and the changing role of the state

Globalisation has reshaped social protection in two ways. On one hand, market reforms have pushed governments toward targeted, conditional and means-tested programmes rather than universal entitlements. On the other, global ideas about rights, gender equality and social investment have entered domestic policy, contributing to legislation like the Maternity Benefit Act, the Right to Education Act and Ayushman Bharat. Multilateral agencies like the World Bank have actively supported India in strengthening targeting, last-mile delivery and social registries.

This shift has been mixed. Privatisation has expanded choice for those who can pay, but it has also widened inequalities in access to quality healthcare and schooling. Critics argue that as the state retreats from direct provision and relies more on markets and contracts, the poorest are most likely to fall through the cracks.

How the layers fit together

In real life, a single household often draws on all three sources at once. A construction worker’s family in a city may use the PDS for grain, rely on relatives in the village for childcare, send a child to a state school but consult a private clinic when ill, and turn to an NGO during a health emergency. Each provider compensates for what the others miss.

This layered system has obvious strengths: it is flexible and locally adapted. But it places enormous coordination costs on the poor themselves, who must constantly navigate multiple gatekeepers, documents and identity systems to claim what is theirs. It also lets the state evade responsibility for failures by pointing to the family or the market as alternatives.

The push to universalise social protection, through unified registries, portable benefits and a more rights-based approach, is partly an effort to reduce these costs. The challenge is to do so without flattening the genuine contributions of community and civil society support.

What do you think? In your own family or neighbourhood, which provider, the state, the family, the community or the market, has played the biggest role during a crisis? And do you think India should move toward a more universal, state-led model of social protection, or continue with the current mixed system?

References

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Who Provides Social Protection in India? A Closer Look at State and Non-State Actors

Table of Contents

What we mean by social protection 🔗

The role of the state as the welfare provider 🔗

Redistribution and poverty alleviation 🔗

Why state provision is uneven 🔗

Non-state actors and informal support 🔗

Family and kinship networks 🔗

Community and religious institutions 🔗

Civil society organisations and NGOs 🔗

Public-private partnerships and the influence of privatisation 🔗

Globalisation and the changing role of the state 🔗

How the layers fit together 🔗