How does the absence of a clear causal model between cash transfers and stated social objectives undermine welfare-state accountability? Illustrate with the Speenhamland precedent.

Welfare accountability rests on a traceable chain — public money, a defined beneficiary, a stated outcome. India's state unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) to women, estimated at about ₹1.68 lakh crore across 12 states in 2025-26 [1], break that chain by asserting "dignity" and "empowerment" without a published causal model.

How the missing model erodes accountability

• Objective ambiguity: without a stated logic linking payout size and design to an outcome, it is unclear whether the scheme relieves poverty, supports wages, or buys political peace — so no one can be held to a target.
• Un-evaluable outcomes: NITI Aayog's DMEO framework requires baselines and output-outcome indicators before fresh appraisal of schemes [2]; UCTs launched without either escape this scrutiny entirely.
• Fiscal opacity: the Economic Survey 2025-26 notes states' fiscal deficit rose to 3.2% of GDP (2024-25), with only 11 states in revenue surplus, and warns that rising reliance on cash transfers constrains expenditure flexibility [3] — the displaced capital and social spending is never disclosed as a trade-off.
• Irreversibility: transfers form a very large share of monthly income for informal-sector women, making withdrawal politically impossible and converting a discretionary scheme into a permanent claim.

The Speenhamland precedent (1795)

• Berkshire magistrates topped up agricultural wages from parish funds, indexed to bread prices and family size — relief without a declared objective.
• Karl Polanyi read it as an assertion of the "right to live" against market forces; critics showed it simultaneously subsidised employers, depressed wages and blurred price signals.
• Its lasting lesson: when a transfer's purpose is undefined, its effects cannot be measured, only contested — and repeal becomes a political rupture rather than a policy decision.

Cash transfers are legitimate instruments of social protection; opacity about their purpose is not. Publishing a scheme-level outcome framework, sunset-and-review clauses, and honest disclosure of displaced expenditure would convert dole politics into accountable welfare — aligning such spending with SDG-1 and SDG-5 rather than merely invoking them.