As the doors of Nabanna went shut on Monday afternoon, the Suvendu Adhikari cabinet had stealthily changed the social pact of West Bengal for at least the past fifteen years. Stipends for imams, muezzins and purohits essentials of the outreach of the previous regime will cease from June. For women, the flat three thousand rupees a month, with the same name Annapurna, will begin from the same day. Women will be able to use state-run buses for free. The state's current OBC list, which had been expanded by an extraordinary fiat between 2010 and 2012, has also been formally disowned; the government had appealed to the Supreme Court to defend it.

To cram this much ideology into one press conference is unusual for a government. At the venue in Nabanna, the minister for Women and Child Welfare, Agnimitra Paul, made it clear that schemes that were categorised based on religion for the Information and Cultural Affairs and Minority Affairs and Madrasa Education departments would continue till the end of May. Following this, the tap is turned off. The availability of scholarships to students, she explained, would not be affected. The difference is intentional. The new dispensation desires to change or replace the appearance of aid from faith-based pools to a universal, gender-based pool.

The numbers after the shift are saying it all. Lakshmir Bhandar has transferred approximately 40,000 crore annually to approximately 2.11 crore women at a rate of 1500 and 1700 per woman for general and SC/ST categories, respectively. The new Annapurna offers flat pay of three thousand rupees to all, irrespective of caste and the total bill comes at somewhere around seventy six thousand crore per year. That's nearly doubling a huge already transfer line, when Trinamool came to power in 2011, the outstanding debt in the state was around two lakh crore. The 3.6 percent fiscal deficit for 2025-26 is already above the Finance Commission's recommended 3.5 percent cap on fiscal deficit as a percentage of state GDP.

It's not just a few tweaks, so to speak, that is the headline reform. This is the biggest single item in a budget where welfare expenditure alone stands at almost 45 per cent of the projected expenditure of three lakh ninety-five thousand crore in 2026-27. Include free bus travel for women, the long-awaited Seventh State Pay Commission that will look into Government salary revisions, and the much talked about three-thousand-rupees-a-month transfers for the unemployed and the elderly that was a part of BJP's “Bhoroshar Shopoth” manifesto, and the bill bulges further. Frankly, there is a serious question about whether there is a state that can bear this burden without falling further into borrowings, given its own weak tax buoyancy and thin private capex.

That's where this story gets interesting and where many on the policy right have been quietly uncomfortable. As one of the senior party leaders told me on the record that the BJP did a U-turn after watching the cash transfers take heavy toll in Bihar, Jharkhand and other places. But it's one thing to set a new course. Another is doubling the cheque. As is evident from the Karnataka model of Gruha Lakshmi and the Telangana Mahalakshmi, once the floor is raised, it is not possible for the next government to lower it. In 2025-26, 12 states had women-specific UCT schemes, compared to two in 2022-23, at a national level equivalent to approximately 0.5 per cent of GDP, or one lakh sixty-eight thousand crore. Now, Bengal has stepped up from the template to the most costly name on that list.

The fiscal worry is real but it's not the only story. It is the other half of Monday's rulings which include the abolition of imam, muezzin and purohit honorariums, the withdrawal of the OBC list and the abolition of faith-categorised aid under cultural affairs and minority affairs that makes the politics sting. Previously, imams of registered mosques used to get three thousand rupees per month and muezzins and purohits had two thousand. That's the muezzin and purohit rate, by the way, which is up five hundred rupees since March, before the Election Commission announced poll dates, and which was far from lost on Calcutta's editorial pages.

The question of OBC is even more spiny. In 2024, the Calcutta High Court ruled that 77 communities which were included in the state's backward classes list from 2010 to 2012 were ineligible and the certificates issued to them were cancelled, amounting to nearly five lakh certificates. Seventy-five of those 77 communities were Muslim. Supreme Court had been transferred to the previous government for appeal. Now, the new government has signalled it will drop the appeal and accept the High Court's findings. Many, if not most, of those who disagreed with the results had to concede: any such list, growing at that rapid pace, in that religious direction, with such little procedural oversight, was always going to be a target for the courts.

That's where the more market-savvy, cost-conscious interpretation of Bengal's turnarounds ends. On its merits, the case to end stipends explicitly classified by faith is not a communal case, but a constitutional case. The state has no right to pay checks to the clerics of one community and not of the other. Religion-agnostic scholarships and skills programmes work when there is a need. At least on paper, the state's new pitch – universal welfare for women, universal access to Ayushman Bharat as against the previous Swasthya Sathi, central schemes like PM Vishwakarma and PM Ujjwala rolled in is a return to citizenship as the unit of welfare and not the community.

What remains to be seen is whether the new welfare arithmetic is viable or just old appeasement in a new guise. The contribution of manufacturing industries to Bengal's GDP has hardly changed in more than ten years. The gross fixed capital formation in the State has been low for years compared to the national average. During the 'welfare expansion', the share of infrastructure expenditure has decreased from more than 5% to approximately 3%. This has been the industry watchers' talking point for years in Park Street offices in Kolkata: the state can't afford to keep paying for social peace while people lose their means of earning the same. If Lakshmir Bhandar is doubled to Annapurna and then free bus travel is added, and a new pay commission, this is an increase in the recurring bill, but not the productive base.

It's not just a phenomenon in the UK. Large-scale unconditional transfers, such as Brazil's Bolsa Família and South Africa's social grants, have been politically attractive and economically sound only when they have been accompanied by an income-side approach growth, formal jobs, tax revenue. There, the same set of programmes have created fiscal space, crowded out capital expenditure and increased the reliance on debt rollover of the states. However, Bengal is more towards the second pattern, given its already over-stretched debt-to-GSDP ratio. The bond markets haven't been panicking, but they have been observing: Yields on state development loans issued by heavily indebted eastern states have been higher than the average across all states this year.

On June 1, all this will be irrelevant to the women who will receive three thousand rupees in their Aadhaar connected accounts. Which, quite possibly, is the brightest part of the write. The new government has taken the most politically protected part of the old machine the direct transfer of cash to women and enlarged it, and it has disassembled the elements that were easy to attack in the courts and that seemed like it might be a biased policy. Free bus travel doesn't cost the exchequer as much as people assume it does because the buses do run anyway, except for the optics of the mobility of working class women in Howrah, Asansol and Siliguri. The Seventh Pay Commission holds the government employees, one of the loudest middle class groups, in check.

What is really new is the tonal change. Bengal's welfare system had two accents over the past 15 years: one universal (for the welfare of women and the elderly) and one community-specific (for clerics and for madrasa education). The decisions on Monday did exactly that, making it one register. If the move wins the cabinet creditable and a judicial validation of the OBC list within a reasonable time frame and if the state's tax and investment figures can expand rapidly in the next 36 months to meet the larger cheques without resorting to further borrowing from the market, then it can be a winning one for the new dispensation. The political turnaround has been completed. There's still not an economic turnaround. Especially in Bengal, the economics has always tended to follow politics.