Why can a policy seem ‘good’ and still cause harm?

Most policies are judged by what they set out to do. A scheme that promises to help farmers, improve health, or create jobs sounds good and is often genuinely well-intentioned. But good intentions are not the same as good outcomes. Policies regularly produce consequences their designers never anticipated, and those consequences rarely draw as much attention as the benefits that were promised at the start.

The economist Frédéric Bastiat called this the distinction between the seen and the unseen. The seen effects are direct and visible: the subsidised bill, the wage payment, and the free textbook. The unseen effects surface later and elsewhere: the market distortions that discourage private investment, the perverse incentives that grow up around any programme, the costs borne by people the scheme was never about. Because the seen arrives first and the unseen arrives quietly, a policy can look like a success long before its full effects are in.

Delhi’s winter smog shows how these unseen effects can compound across decades of well-meaning policy. The story is usually told as farmers burning stubble. The fuller story runs back forty years.

In the 1980s, Green Revolution incentives pushed Punjab farmers toward rice and wheat, away from traditional crops. MSP guarantees and free electricity for groundwater pumping made intensive rice cultivation viable. The seen effect was food security. The unseen effect was a quietly depleting aquifer.

When groundwater depletion finally became impossible to ignore, Punjab responded with the Preservation of Subsoil Water Act in 2009, delaying rice transplanting to align it with the monsoon so that less groundwater would be drawn. The seen effect was relief on the water table. The unseen effect was a calendar problem: the later transplanting meant a later harvest, leaving farmers days rather than weeks to clear their fields before the wheat sowing window closed. The fastest way to clear a field in days is to set it alight.

Each intervention addressed a real problem. Each one created the conditions for the next. The stubble burning that chokes Delhi every November is not farmers being reckless. It is farmers responding rationally to a sequence of incentives the government itself built, one layer at a time.

So the question a policymaker should ask is not simply “what does this scheme do?” It is “what does it do to everyone it touches, including those it was never designed for, and what will it look like in ten years?” That is a much harder question. It is also the right one.