THE DIRECTIVE POLICIES OF STATE POLICY AND WELFARE

STATE:

The Directive Policies of State Policy can be found under Part-IV of the Constitution and
contains the fundamental principles of governance of our country. Thus, it can be said that the
Directive Principles lays down a road map which in turn helps in pointing out the modus
operandi for the elected government to attain the goals set out by the Constitution through the
Preamble. It is a mandate on the State to make laws by applying the principles laid down in the

Directive Principles.

Several rights of utmost human significance and importance such as the right to work, the right
to have just and human conditions of work, the right to an adequate means of livelihood, the
right to a living wage, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to share material resources
of the community and so on came to be included within the ambit of Directive Principles of State
Policy.

However, they could not be enforced in a court of law since they were in the nature of
guidelines which in turn barred the courts issue directions to the Parliament and the legislatures
of respective states to make laws to further these directives.

The rationale behind such principles is to ensure good governance and to achieve the motive of
setting up a welfare state . In the case of Ashoka Kumar Thakur it has been held that the
Directive Principles of State Policy are non- justiciable as implementation of many of these
principles would depend on the financial capability of the State . Thus, one can say that it is
because of such reasons that implementation of such Directive Principles of State Policy is the
duty of the instrumentalities of the State to “give effect” to the Fundamental Rights and “strive to
give effect” to the Directive Principles of State Policy.
John Rawls provides The principle of justice requires the arrangements of social and economical
inequalities, ‘to the greatest benefit of the least advantage’, consistent with the just saving
principles. Directive Principles of State Policy have served a useful purpose in visualizing India

as a welfare state. Some of the directives would not only serve the cause of socialism but would
also help in ensuring the real enjoyment of Fundamental Rights

In the work of Rawls, the terms social justice, distributive justice, and justice are used
indistinctly, but they are employed in a broader sense to apply to the institutions that generate
benefits and burdens in society and to the way in which these are distributed . Rawls draws a
distinction between distributive justice and allocative justice as:

“The problem of distributive justice in justice as fairness is always this: how are the institutions
of the basic structure to be regulated as one unified scheme of institutions so that a fair,
efficient, and productive system of social cooperation can be maintained over time, from one
generation to the next? Contrast this with the very different problem of how a given bundle of
commodities is to be distributed, or allocated, among various individuals whose particular
needs, desires, and preferences are known to us, and who have not cooperated in any way to
produce these commodities. This second problem is that of allocative justice.”

The scope of social justice is the basic structure of society, which includes the economic,
political, and legal structures governing economic cooperation.

Plato in “Republic” book II observed that men agreed to not suffer harm (injustice) and inflict
harm (injustice), hence there arise laws, mutual covenant, this they affirm to be origin and nature
of justice.

WELFARE STATE:

Prof. W. Friedmann. Importance of a Welfare State is twofold :

it provides a wide range of benefits to be made available by the State to the citizens as of right,
but at the same time it enhances the power of the bureaucracy, since the benefits thus provided
are inevitably administered by government departments or their agents.