About the event

Join us for the book launch of Professor Louise Tillin’s new book Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Making India Work examines the development of India’s ‘welfare state’ over the last century from the early decades of the twentieth century to the present. Along the way, the book explains the origins of social insurance for what we now know as India’s formal sector, how the decades of postcolonial planning served to entrench a ‘duty to work’ in the absence of an engine of employment creation in the urban sector, through to the impact of economic liberalisation and political regionalisation on the more recent rise of social assistance and ‘direct transfers’.

Welfare politics take centre stage in India's electoral landscape today. Direct benefits and employment generation form the mainstays of social provision, while most citizens lack dependable rights to sickness leave, pensions, maternity benefits or unemployment insurance. Making India Work traces the origins and development of India's welfare regime, recovering a history previously relegated to the margins of scholarship on the political economy of development. Through deeply researched analysis, the book captures long-term patterns of continuity and change against a backdrop of nation-building, economic change, and democratisation. Making India Work demonstrates that while patronage and resource constraints have undermined the provision of public goods, Indian workers, employers, politicians and bureaucrats have long debated what an Indian 'welfare state' should look like. The ideas and principles shaping earlier policies remain influential today.

Louise will be in discussion with Indrajit Roy, University of York and Sheba Tejani, King’s College London, in a conversation chaired by Christophe Jaffrelot, King’s College London/CERI-Sciences Po.

About the speaker

Louise Tillin

Louise Tillin is a Professor of Politics in the King’s India Institute. Her forthcoming edited collection (with Rob Jenkins), Deconstructing India’s Democracy: Essays in Honour of James Manor, will be published by Orient Blackswan in 2025. Her earlier books include Remapping India: New States and their Political Origins (Hurst & Co/Oxford University Press, 2013), Politics of Welfare: Comparisons across Indian States, edited with Rajeshwari Deshpande and KK Kailash (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2015), Indian Federalism (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2019) and The Politics of Poverty Reduction in India: The UPA Government, 2004 to 2014 (with James Chiriyankandath, Diego Maiorano and James Manor) (New Delhi, Orient Blackswan, 2020).

Discussants

Indrajit Roy

Indrajit Roy is Professor at the University of York’s Department of Politics and International Relations. He worked in the development sector for seven years prior to undertaking his doctoral studies at the University of Oxford. Since obtaining a doctorate in development studies, he has held the ESRC Future Research Leader Fellowship at the Oxford Department of International Development (ODID) as well as a Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. His research and teaching contribute to critical approaches to studying the politics of global development, with a focus on ‘new development futures’ that promise to reframe the discipline.

Sheba Tejani

Sheba Tejani is a Senior Lecturer in International Development at King's College London. Her work is centred on the distributional consequences of international trade and structural transformation in developing countries. She is interested in the effects of technological upgrading, automation and gender segregation on workers and the future of work. She has studied labour market inequalities in the context of structural change and export-oriented industrialization in countries in the Global South. In a related and emerging research programme, she explores the consolidation of Hindu majoritarianism in India and its relationship to development and exclusion.

Chair

Christophe Jaffrelot

Christophe Jaffrelot is Avantha Chair and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King's India Institute and also the Research Lead for the Global Institutes, King’s College London. He teaches South Asian politics and history at Sciences Po, Paris and is an Overseas Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was Director of Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po, between 2000 and 2008.

Christophe is currently (co-)leading four collective research projects on Muslims in India (Henry Luce Foundation, with Princeton University and Columbia University), Shared Sacred Sites in South Asia (Agence National de la Recherche Scientifique - with EHESS), the Social Profile of Indian National and Provincial Elected Representatives (CNRS - with Ashoka University) and Federalism in Pakistan (with Lahore University of Management Science).

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