What is Welfare State according to Kautilya?

In Kautilya’s book the idea of a welfare state is repeated with great force. According to him, the kin must ensure that people of the four castes and four orders of life keep to their respective path, repetition duties and occupations. He warns that a reckless prince will easily fall prey to enemies.

There are three virtues he admired the most. He enjoins that the King must provide for the orphans, the aged, the helpless and the afflicted. Helpless women must be provided subsistence by the state when they are pregnant.

The king is also required to construct dams, rivers, and roads, to maintain forests, and pr vide help and superintendence to places of pilgrimage. He is also to supervise the reservoirs con structured by cooperative enterprises of the people and to ensure that those who do not work get no gain from them.

The king must protect agriculturists from molestation and other kinds of oppression, force labour and oppressive taxes. During famines, the king is asked to help the people by providing see and provisions.

He was convinced that a vicious and unrighteous king who ignores the welfare of hi subjects would fall a victim to popular fury or become vulnerable to enemies. Such a state in which people are not happy is a weak state.

The idea of a positive state is taken up and the king is authorised to create conditions for a good list by not only digging wells, canals, and constructing dams, planting trees, preservation of forest but al by providing the infrastructure for trade, commerce and industry through construction of roads a providing an impetus for navigation. He was the first thinker who consciously thought of an all-India state or even empire.

Kautilya was not only concerned with corruption of officials but also of everyone in public life. F instance he proposed that, there should be a superintendent of merchandise to exercise control over trade practices so that traders are not able to oppress the people.

The king is enjoined to punish thirty types of criminals after ascertaining their activities with the help of the spies. Kautilya’s vision undoubtedly rooted in the classical ideas of virtue and he admired courage, truth, fortitude and all. He did not have much interest in pure philosophical speculation but was more concerned with practical moral virtues.

He thought that a minister possessing only theoretical knowledge was likely blunder. He understood politics essentially in administrative terms, of good and a bad administration, recognising the former as necessary to the foundation and maintenance of a good state. A good administration is necessary in order to ensure individual security and social stability.

It is significant that in his writings, the state becomes the supreme association and religion a private affair. Indeed, the secularisation of political life was achieved nowhere better than in Kautilya’s work. His pleas to have the sanyasins registered were a clear demonstration of this. He was aware of the religious corruption of the times. So great is his concern for the stability of the state that he thought that even the powers of the king are justified because they lead to the good of the state.

He further says that politics deals with “the acquisition of what has not been gained, the preservation of what has been acquired, the increase of what has been preserved, and the bestowal of the surplus upon the deservers.”