Platform Governance as Fiscal Architecture: Reading the ES–FC–Budget Ensemble

Abstract:-
This paper argues that understanding contemporary Indian welfare governance requires reading across documents that scholarship typically treats separately: the Economic Survey, the Finance Commission Report, and the Union Budget. Between 2014 and 2026, these documents—each addressing its proper readership—worked together to produce effects none individually announced or defended: frozen eligibility bases, asymmetric fiscal discipline between Centre and states, and the replacement of political negotiation with platform enforced compliance. The paper traces this transformation across three phases, showing how the grammar of discipline articulated in the Economic Survey, the mechanisms of constraint developed through Finance Commission processes, and their operationalisation through the Budget were constructed in tandem. The result is what the paper terms “platform governance as fiscal architecture”: the use of digital systems not merely to deliver welfare but to cap coverage, restructure federal fiscal relations, and discipline state-level variation—all without repealing the rights-based legislation that nominally governs these domains. India’s trajectory appears distinctive in comparative perspective: not explicit retrenchment but rollback of a rights-based framework without formal repeal. Making this architecture visible requires reading against disciplinary grain—only then can its implications for democratic citizenship be assessed.

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