Why do politicians announce new schemes when similar ones already exist, instead of fixing the existing scheme?

Because a new scheme is visible and a repair is not. Announcing a programme lets a leader give it a name, hold a launch event, and claim it as his own initiative. Quietly improving an existing one earns none of that. The work is harder, the credit is thinner, and the photograph is worse.

There is a second reason, less obvious but more powerful. Fixing a scheme means first admitting it is broken. That requires pointing to leakages, administrative failures, and poor implementation, and those failures usually trace back to earlier decisions the same political class is responsible for. Raghuram Rajan made a version of this point in Fault Lines: those in power are reluctant to expose systemic fault lines, because the fault often leads back to them. A new launch sidesteps the problem entirely. It signals action without conceding that anything went wrong.

India’s policy history reads as a long demonstration of this. The Total Sanitation Campaign became the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, which became the Swachh Bharat Mission in 2014, each a rebrand of essentially the same sanitation goal. In 2025, MGNREGA, after nearly two decades, was replaced by the Viksit Bharat Gram Yojana. The underlying objective rarely changes. The name, the branding, and the minister taking credit do.

The choice also serves a narrower electoral logic. A new scheme can be aimed at a specific bloc, farmers, women, a particular region, in a way that patching an old programme cannot. Fixing leaky pipes in an existing welfare system mobilises no one. Announcing a fresh transfer to a target group mobilises exactly the voters a party needs.

Underneath all of this is administrative reality. Indian schemes pass through many hands: central ministries design them, states adapt them, and districts implement them. When something fails, the failure is smeared across that chain, and repairing it demands coordination, procedural change, and sustained monitoring, none of which produces a quick or attributable win. Worse, neglected programmes tend to drift from their original purpose and swell in cost over time, a problem of scope creep examined in the next question.

So the incentive runs one way. The new scheme is seen: named, launched, and credited. The patient reform of the old one is the unseen: slow, awkward, and invisible at the ballot box, even when it would do more good. Governments respond to what voters can see, and a launch is far easier to see than a fix.