"Development and welfare schemes for the vulnerable, by its nature, are discriminatory in approach." Do you agree? Give reasons for your answer.

The claim and the constitutional reply

• Article 14 permits reasonable classification: intelligible differentia plus a rational nexus with the object of the law; it does not require identical treatment of unequals.
• Article 15(1) bars discrimination on listed grounds, while Article 15(3), 15(4), 15(5) and 15(6) allow special provisions for women, children, socially and educationally backward classes, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and economically weaker sections.
• Article 16(4) and 16(4A) allow reservation in public employment; Article 46 directs special care for SCs, STs and the weaker sections.
• Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992) accepted backward-class reservation as compatible with equality, with limits such as the exclusion of the creamy layer for OBCs.
• Substantive equality, as later benches have put it in gender and disability cases, is the name for this approach: the State may discriminate in favour of the vulnerable so that equality of outcome is not a fiction.

Why targeted schemes look “discriminatory” and why that is intended

• Universal schemes can miss those without documents, land, or a male household head; targeting is a response to that failure, not a taste for exclusion.
• The National Food Security Act, 2013, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, scholarships, hostels, and disability pensions name beneficiaries because scarcity and history are not evenly spread.
• Exclusion errors (leaving out the poor) and inclusion errors (covering the better-off) are design faults; they do not prove that targeting itself is unconstitutional.
• A purely universal cash transfer can still be financed by progressive taxation; the stem is about schemes for the vulnerable, which are targeted by definition.

Limits and the disagreement that remains

• Targeting can stigmatise, fragment citizenship, and create patronage lists if identification is political.
• Creamy-layer logic, Aadhaar-based lists, and social audits are tools to keep the classification tied to disadvantage.
• One should therefore agree with the statement only in this precise sense: such schemes are discriminatory in form because they classify. One should not agree if “discriminatory” means arbitrary or anti-equality.

Reasoned position

• I agree that welfare for the vulnerable is a classified, hence formally discriminatory, approach.
• I do not agree that this violates constitutional equality; it is how Articles 15(3)–(6), 16(4) and 46 operationalise equality for a society that is already unequal.