The Social State
Her central political claim was unfashionable then and is contested now: that care for the destitute, the sick and the abandoned is a direct responsibility of the state, not a residue left to private kindness.
The position, stated in 1949
“This is not a matter which could be left to private enterprise, but the State must take direct responsibility. There is no good in our stating the Directive Principles, which will remain as pious declarations unless given effect to by the State.”G. Durgabai on the protection of abandoned children, Constituent Assembly of India Debates, Vol. IX, 3 September 1949
She said this four years before she was in a position to act on it. In 1953 she became founder chairperson of the body created to do so.
Interactive
The problem, and the response
Six conditions of Indian social life in the 1950s, and the institutional answers Durgabai Deshmukh was involved in. Select a challenge to read the response. None of these problems was solved; each was, for the first time, given somewhere to go.
Response 01
The Central Social Welfare Board, 1953
Set up by a resolution of the Government of India to promote voluntary effort and to give technical and financial assistance to voluntary organisations working for the welfare of women, children and families. Durgabai Deshmukh was its founder chairperson.
Welfare in India was carried almost entirely by scattered voluntary bodies with no dependable income, no technical support and no standing with government. Many did excellent work and closed anyway.
A statutory-style national board acting as an interface between government money and voluntary energy — grants-in-aid, technical help, and a permanent line in the national plan rather than an annual appeal.
Response 02
An argument carried from the Assembly into administration
In September 1949 she told the Constituent Assembly that the criminal law punished the person who abandoned a child but did nothing whatever for the child. She asked for a legislative entry so that it would at least be clear whether the Centre or a State was responsible.
Abandoned and exploited children were covered by the Directive Principles, which no court could enforce, and by homes run on charity that were “struggling for their daily existence” in her words.
Child and family welfare became a standing category of assisted work under the Board from 1953, funded from public revenue. The constitutional entry she asked for in 1949 was not made; the administrative route was the one that opened.
Response 03
Legal training, put to use
By her own later account she read law in order to be able to give poor women free legal aid, and she practised at the Madras High Court from 1942. Legal awareness remained part of the programme of the organisations she led.
A woman with a claim about maintenance, property or custody needed money, literacy and a male relative's cooperation to pursue it. Most had none of the three, so the right went unused.
Advocacy by a trained lawyer for individuals, and — more durably — the constitutional argument she made in 1948 that a remedy must be as real as the right. See Chapter 04.
Response 04
The National Committee on Women's Education, 1958–59
Appointed in May 1958 and reporting in January 1959, under her chairmanship — the first committee after independence devoted specifically to the education of girls and women.
Female literacy was very low, girls left school far earlier than boys, and no part of the education administration had the job of noticing.
Administrative machinery: a women's education unit in the central ministry, a Director of Women's Education in each state, and dated enrolment targets. Detailed in Chapter 08.
Response 05
A nursing home in Hyderabad, 1962
She began a nursing home of fifteen beds in Hyderabad in 1962 under the Andhra Mahila Sabha, with the stated purpose of serving the poor. It grew into what is today the Durgabai Deshmukh Hospital and Research Centre, a multi-speciality hospital of over two hundred beds with associated nursing and physiotherapy training.
Hospital care was concentrated, expensive, and effectively closed to poor women — particularly for maternity and for the chronic illnesses that follow poverty.
A small charitable facility designed to grow, attached to an organisation that could sustain it. The growth to a teaching hospital happened over decades and long after her death; the fifteen beds were hers.
Response 06
Work with the Blind Relief Association
She served as president of the Blind Relief Association, under which a school, a hostel and a light engineering workshop for blind people were established. The presidency is reported to date from 1944, though the year is not consistently given across sources.
Blind and disabled people in mid-century India were overwhelmingly dependent on family or on begging. Charity offered shelter; it very rarely offered a trade.
The characteristic Durgabai combination: education, residence and paid skilled work in one place, so that support led towards independence rather than substituting for it.
Why 1953 was a turning point
India in the early 1950s was building an economy: dams, steel plants, fertiliser, power. Social services were, in planning language, “soft” expenditure, and the first thing cut when a plan ran short. The creation of the Central Social Welfare Board was an argument won inside that debate.
Its design is the interesting part. It did not set out to nationalise welfare or to build a bureaucracy that delivered services itself. It set out to keep alive the thousands of small organisations already doing the work — women's associations, orphanages, schools for disabled children, rural welfare centres — by giving them public money and technical support, and by treating them as partners rather than supplicants.
That is a recognisably Gandhian instinct, executed with the machinery of a modern state. It is also, for good and ill, the model on which much of India's social sector still runs.
That the Board was established in 1953 and that Durgabai Deshmukh was its founder chairperson are matters of public record. Precise figures for how many organisations it funded, how many people were reached, or what changed as a result are not reproduced on this site, because reliable period figures were not available in compiling it. Numbers of that kind circulate widely and are rarely sourced. None are invented here.
Not a simple story
It would be easy, and wrong, to present the Indian welfare state of the 1950s as a straightforward triumph. Three complications belong in any honest account.
- Reach. A national board in Delhi funding voluntary bodies reaches the places where voluntary bodies already exist. That is not evenly distributed, and it was least dense where need was greatest.
- Dependence. Making voluntary organisations dependent on public grants changes them. It steadies them and it also disciplines them, and the argument about that trade-off has never been settled.
- Scale. Against the size of Indian poverty in 1953, everything attempted was small. Recognising that is not a criticism of the people who attempted it; it is the condition under which they worked.
Durgabai's own framing was more modest than the one her admirers use. She argued that the state must take direct responsibility — not that it had.