Authors: Parinika S, Arpita Seal, Sajith Angathan M S, Sweety Kumari, Amit Kumar Sahni, Jyotsana, Purbasa Singh
INTRODUCTION
The relationship between policy design and policy outcome in welfare governance has long constituted one of the central preoccupations of public administration scholarship. In the Indian context, this relationship is considered particularly complex due to the coexistence of an expansive legislative welfare architecture and persistent structural barriers to its implementation, particularly barriers in administrative capacity, infrastructural deficit, social stratification and the institutional incentives that shape bureaucratic behaviour at every level of the delivery chain. The result is a system in which the formal entitlements of citizens frequently diverge from the material benefits they receive. Understanding where this divergence narrows and under what conditions is among the most consequential questions to contemporary policy research.
The Public Distribution System (PDS) represents perhaps the most instructive site for this inquiry. As the primary instrument of food security policy in India, the PDS operates at an intersection of constitutional commitment, fiscal transfer and last-mile administrative execution that exposes the structural tensions inherent in large-scale welfare governance. Its chronic weaknesses, such as leakage, exclusion error, intermediary capture, and the persistence of informal power within formally regulated supply chains, have been extensively documented in this paper. Less thoroughly examined, however, are the conditions under which these pathologies can be meaningfully attenuated through deliberate institutional intervention and the structural limits that such intervention inevitably encounters.
It is precisely this question that the state of Chhattisgarh is positioned to answer. Established as a separate administrative unit in 2000, Chhattisgarh inherited a governance environment characterised by weak institutional capacity, high structural poverty, a significant Scheduled Tribe population concentrated in geographically remote and infrastructurally underserved regions, and a PDS apparatus distinguished chiefly by the scale of its dysfunction. Estimates from the early reform period suggest that approximately 52% of allocated food grains were diverted before reaching their intended beneficiaries, a figure that reflects not merely administrative inefficiency but the systematic capture of the distribution mechanism by private intermediaries operating with impunity in the absence of credible oversight.
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