Who Is the Government’s Favourite Child?

Every family has one. The child whose achievements get announced at dinner, whose mistakes are forgiven a little faster, and whose needs somehow make it to the top of the list. Maybe nobody officially declares a favourite, but you can usually tell who gets the most attention. 

Governments have favourites too, just not necessarily in the way we think. They cannot respond to every citizen equally, so they have to decide who gets noticed, prioritised and helped first. Also sometimes, the people who get noticed are not necessarily those who need help the most. They are the ones the state can see most easily.

The Paperwork Test

Every welfare system starts with an act of classification. And before the state can provide food, housing or social security, it has to know who is eligible. That means categories, databases, documents, addresses, and eligibility criteria. And there is a good reason for that. No government can make a personal policy for each citizen. Well you have limited resources and so you have to target them. And to be able to target, you need some way of identifying beneficiaries.

But there is a catch: eligibility for administration can begin to replace actual need.

An example of this tension is India’s Public Distribution System. Aadhaar-based authentication was introduced in part to reduce duplication and improve targeting. Research has also documented the new forms of exclusion that biometric failures and digital processes can create. For instance, a study on the PDS in Andhra Pradesh found that in the first sixteen days of December 2017, around 94,000 ration cards could not be authenticated through Aadhaar; of these, about 92% were because of biometric mismatches.

It’s not that digitization is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the government has employed technology to increase the mobility of the system. The One Nation One Ration Card scheme now allows NFSA beneficiaries to collect their entitled foodgrains from any ePoS-enabled fair price shop anywhere in the country, a reform that is particularly relevant for those who move for work. The lesson is subtler. A system that is meant to make welfare more efficient can still create barriers if the person in front of the system does not perfectly match the system’s requirements.

When Your Address Moves, But Your Entitlement Doesn't

A migrant worker working in Delhi, can hold a ration card from Bihar. Wherever they are, they need food. Welfare systems, in contrast, have traditionally been built on administrative boundaries and fixed residential locations. The pandemic showed how consequential this could be. Workers crossing state borders for work suddenly found themselves outside the systems through which they would normally have been entitled to support. It was not that their vulnerability had suddenly dropped out of sight but that the location no longer matched the administrative location to which their entitlements were attached.

One Nation One Ration Card is somewhat of an attempt to solve exactly this problem. The Department of Food and Public Distribution says portability is especially helpful for migrants who frequently change their place of dwelling in search of temporary employment. That in itself reveals something important about policy design: sometimes exclusion does not require the government to say “no”. It excludes a person. The system was designed around a citizen that stays put.

When the State Has No Box for You

There’s another kind of invisibility: not fitting into a legal category that already exists. For decades, traditional employer-employee relationships were the basis of India’s labour laws. That framework did not neatly accommodate gig and platform workers. This was changed with the Code on Social Security, 2020, which recognised gig and platform workers as a category in law and laid down the legal framework for social-security schemes related to life and disability cover, accident insurance, health and maternity benefits and old-age protection. The Code came into effect in November 2025.

What changed was their legal visibility.

According to NITI Aayog, India’s gig workforce was 7.7 million in 2020-21 and is expected to expand to 23.5 million by 2029-30. Their eventual recognition demonstrates that policy can lag behind social and economic change: sometimes a problem can only be more easily tackled once the state has created a category through which to see it.

So, Does the Government Have a Favourite Child?

Not really.

The state is not required to pick winners and losers on the basis of bias. Governments require categories. They need databases. They require eligibility rules. They have to find ways to distribute limited resources at an enormous scale. But these systems can establish a pattern that counts: the citizen who is easier to find, count, verify and process is often easier to help. That gives us a different way of thinking about fairness in policy. We usually ask if a scheme reaches the people who need it? Perhaps we should also ask whether the scheme was designed to recognise those people anyway.

The problem, therefore, is not just to formulate more welfare schemes. It’s about creating systems flexible enough to identify people whose lives don’t fit neatly into the boxes created for them. For the government’s favourite child might not be the richest, the poorest, the most deserving or the most vulnerable.

It might just be the one whose name is on the list already.

So the next time a policy is announced, don't just ask: Who is it helping? Ask: Who was this policy designed to see and who was it built to miss?