Comment on the relevance of the Directive Principles of State Policy in an era of liberalization and globalization. (2012, 2019, 15 Marks)
Part IV (Articles 36–51) blends socialist, Gandhian and liberal directives written for a state expected to own and allocate. The 1991 reforms, which dismantled licensing and invited private and foreign capital, seemed to leave that design stranded. Yet the directives have been reinterpreted rather than retired: where the state withdraws from production, Part IV marks what markets will not supply.
The Case for Obsolescence
- Articles 39(b) and (c), distributing material resources and preventing concentration of wealth, presuppose an allocating state; disinvestment and privatisation reverse that premise.
- The FRBM Act 2003 narrowed fiscal room; the Competition Act 2002 polices market power for efficiency, not social justice; WTO disciplines limit subsidies and local-content rules.
- Global competition for capital pushes labour and environmental standards down, the “race to the bottom”.
Why the Directives Remain Relevant
- Reinterpretation, not repeal. In Dr. Balram Singh v. Union of India (25 November 2024) the Supreme Court read “socialist” as a welfare-state commitment that does not bar private enterprise. In Property Owners Association v. State of Maharashtra (5 November 2024), a nine-judge bench held 8:1 that not all private property is a material resource of the community under Article 39(b), calling the Constitution economically neutral. Part IV specifies ends, not an economic model.
- The rights-based turn. The liberalisation decades produced India’s densest welfare legislation: MGNREGA 2005 (replaced by the VB–G RAM G Act 2025, 125 days), the Forest Rights Act 2006, the RTE Act 2009 and the National Food Security Act 2013 (about 81 crore people). Growth supplied the resources whose absence justified non-justiciability in 1950.
- Regulating private power. The four labour codes (in force November 2025) bring gig and platform workers under social security, an Article 41–43 concern in the platform economy, though critics see the higher lay-off approval threshold (300 workers) as a retreat from Article 43.
- Market failures. Environmental harm, health and old-age care are where markets underperform. Courts read Article 48A into Article 21, and M. K. Ranjitsinh (2024) recognised a right against the adverse effects of climate change.
- Liberal directives gain ground. A uniform civil code (Article 44) is in force in Uttarakhand since January 2025, with Bills passed in Gujarat, Assam and Madhya Pradesh in 2026.
Limits
- Inequality has widened: the World Inequality Lab (2024) puts the top one per cent at about 22.6 per cent of national income in 2022–23, against Articles 38(2) and 39(c).
- Private provision dominates health and higher education, and informal work remains the norm, so Article 43’s living wage is still distant.
- Shifting 40 per cent of rural-employment costs to most states under the 2025 Act tests whether “the State” can discharge a directive by relocating its burden.
Conclusion
Globalisation has changed the directives’ instruments, not their relevance. Part IV no longer asks the state to own the economy; it asks the state to regulate, insure and guarantee within a market economy. The widening gap between growth and equity makes them more relevant now, as the Constitution’s standing reminder that development must be judged by its distribution.