In an interview with The Wire’s associate editor Pragya Singh, Economist and author Reetika Khera discusses her new book, Freebies or Rights: Understanding Social Policy in India, addressing the shifts in India’s priorities regarding welfare spending.She addresses the widening gap between rising GDP and the realities that most of India’s population faces. She says increasing tax rates, expanding the tax base or other ways to raise government revenues are very difficult to talk about in India. Instead, both fiscal anxieties and skewed priorities, such as heavy defence budgets, continue to pressurise the poor.Watch the full interview: