In the Quest of a Social Democracy

The introductory chapter of this book highlights the importance of social protection policies against the background of India’s socio-economic transformation and why it ought to be an important part of the development policy. After succinctly putting forward our fundamental argument—the need for a systems approach to social protection and development resilience as the scope of this system—we highlight our contributions to the existing scholarship in this area. We conclude this chapter by laying out the roadmap for the rest of the chapters to follow in this book.