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Affirmative Action? Sure, India Numba Wan 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳
Welfare? I don't really see that being the case. Both the quality and breadth of amenities available to many Western welfare states I can name, such as the UK, utterly dwarfs the kind of coverage an Indian can expect.
We have free public healthcare. It is not terrible, it manages to provide maybe 50% the care, if not the comfort, of say, the NHS. Medicine, in both senses of the word, has strong power laws. The easy and cheap (free) availability of say, the WHO's top 100 list of essential medications means maybe 90% of patients presenting with a disease can get curative treatment.
But healthcare isn't the only part of a welfare state. There's housing, and India doesn't have anything like free/extremely subsidized public housing, along the lines of council flats and so on.
Food? Well, if you really like rice and lentils. You might even stave off most of the obvious nutritional deficiencies.
The welfare system in India is, of necessity, the bare minimum needed to ensure nobody starves to death or dies without at least one disinterested, overworked and underequipped doctor laying hands on them. Maybe you get cheap electricity and water. Subsidized public transport. Education, and quality at that once you're past high school, IITs and AIIMS (or most government run medical colleges) are far more prestigious than their private, for-profit counterparts.
I can't think of any aspect that makes the welfare state here more all-encompassing, and not just in terms of how much it can offer the average person. Western welfare states almost all offer better and more.
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