26 SOCIAL SCIENTIST institutions has been mounted in India. It proceeded to argue that needs and rights can provide alternative groundings for a philosophy of welfare. In the last section, finally, the political agenda of alternative development was seen to contain some potential to effect a convergence between these dual claims of needs and rights. The politics of reservations also appeal to rights based in claims of needs, though in this case they are needs defined with reference to traditional social categories like caste. In both these spheres of political action, rights provide a ground from which to claim welfare, rather than the ground from which to attack redistributive welfare policies. The extra-political definition of development as well as welfare, and their mutual disjoining, are thus both called into question by new forms of democratic politics which seek to bring these concepts into the arena of political debate and necessarily also forge important links between them. It is suggested, in this paper, that if the Indian state makes a transition from interventionism to welfare, that conception of welfare will depend substantially on these new forms of democratic politics as they give new meanings to the idea of development. In the final analysis, however, there is cause for concern to the extent that the political agendas to which welfare is central are necessarily also the agendas of the marginalised. It is hard to discern, in the World Development Report 1993, any room for these concerns or agendas. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Nozick, Robert Anarchy, State and Utopia, Basic Books, New York, 1974. 1 Rothbard, Murray, For a New Liberty, Collier, New York, 1978. 3. Rao, Jerry, "The Libertarian Argument", Seminar, No. 380,1991. 4. Chatterjee, Partha, "Development Planning and the Indian State" in T.J. Byres, (ed.). The State and Development Planning in India, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1993. 5. Rao, J. Mohan, "Agricultural Development under State Planning" in Byres, T.J., ibid. 6. O'Neill, Qnora, Faces of Hunger, Alien and Unwin, London, 1988. 7. Jalan, Bimal, India's Economic Crisis, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1991. 8. Government of India, Planning Commission, Second Five Year Plan, New Delhi, 1956. 9. Government of India, Planning Commission, Towards Social Transformation: Approach to the Eight Five Year Plan, 1990-95, New Delhi, 1990. 10. Pedersen, Jorden Dige, "The Complexities of Conditionality: The Case of India", The European Journal of Development Research, Special Number on Political Conditionality, Vol. 4, No. 1, June 1993. 11. Harris, David, Justifying State Welfare, Basil BlackweU, Oxford, 1987.