Louise Tillin is a Professor of Politics in the King’s India Institute.

Her new book Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy is published by 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’. The book project was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2018-19).

A 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).

Other recent research, supported by the British Academy and conducted in collaboration with Oliver Heath, Sanjay Kumar, Jyoti Mishra and Sandhya Venkateswaran, has examined electoral perceptions around health in India. A summary of this research can be accessed here and as part of a forthcoming special issue of World Development on the future of work and welfare in India.

Louise has previously led research projects on subnational comparative politics and social policy in India (British Academy International Partnership, with Lokniti/CSDS), on explaining electoral change in urban and rural India (Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)), and on India’s Political Economy (UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI) Trilateral Partnership with UC Berkeley and Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR). Between 2013-7, she was part of a multi-country research programme on the politics of reducing poverty and inequality across Brazil, China, India and South Africa supported by the ESRC. She was also the King’s Principal Investigator on the Horizon 2020 European Training Network Global India led by Dublin City University. She is former Managing Editor of the journal Regional and Federal Studies, and an editorial advisory board member of Pacific Affairs and India Law Review.

Before joining King’s in 2011, Louise was Joyce Lambert Research Fellow in Politics at Newnham College, Cambridge. Louise holds a DPhil in Development Studies from the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Sussex. She was a Thouron Scholar (MA South Asia Regional Studies) at the University of Pennsylvania and has a BA (Hons) History from Cambridge.

Research

• Federalism, democracy and territorial politics
• History and politics of Indian social policy
• Political economy of development in India
• Subnational comparative politics

Teaching

Postgraduate

• 7YYINGA4 Global Affairs Capstone Project
• 7YYIN030 Global Welfare Politics

Further details

See Louise's research profile