NEW DELHI: Will history remember Sonia Gandhi as the greatest spender for public good or a politician who destroyed the India story?There are few factors that will individually bear more upon Congressmen’s minds in the run-up to 2014 than party president Sonia Gandhi’s health — and her political economic interventions.When Gandhi felt unwell during Monday’s food security bill debate in Lok Sabha, the two questions got framed in a dramatic context. Her brief hospitalisation — innocuous as it appears — inevitably brings to focus the question of health; she has had a surgery.How she copes with the rigours of politics is her own decision. But how her political economic interventions will play out is something everyone will have an opinion and a vote on.Indeed, history’s verdict on Gandhi will depend largely on whether or not the four “Sonia laws” — Right to Information, Right to Education, Rural Employment Guarantee and Food Security — will do for India what she wants them to.This given that the Centre has spent and will spend vast amounts of money on these efforts.Opinion is sharply divided on the net impact of the Sonia laws but one thing is clear: she has shaped India's development policy to an extent and in a manner few others have.Working from outside the government, she has initiated more welfare spending than perhaps any other politician in history.Many are opposed to the unbridled power without responsibility that Gandhi enjoys in the Indian setup. The massive welfare spending she has initiated, they believe, has contributed to the recent troubles of the economy and will make recovery that much harder. But her political legacy, some argue, is likely to be a benign one."Let's assume the worst about their motives. But this is a society where a majority has always lived with enormous handicaps and at the margins of survival. It is a goal everybody should have in their heart that no Indian should sleep hungry. Nobody who wants to educate herself should suffer from a lack of opportunity. All the opposition to these schemes will be forgotten. This is the legacy she will be remembered by," social scientist Ashis Nandy said.Nandy said he is not unaware of the many flaws in the schemes Gandhi has delivered. A study on MNREGA in Orissa conducted by the Centre for Environment and Food Security, a thinktank chaired by Nandy, found that "most of the funds were being stolen", he said. "But these gestures have a meaning. Somebody had to set this as a goal. They cannot wait for the trickle down. Because that will take a few generations," he added.This weekend, Gandhi put to rest speculation that Congress might opt for early elections. With the economy and the currency doing worse than anybody had predicted a year ago, a belief was building up that the party might opt for early polls to stem the sentiment deficit. Gandhi has never publicly expressed any concern about the economic situation."She is responsible, more than anyone else, for single-handedly destroying India's economy. That is her legacy," said economist Surjit Bhalla, chairman of Oxus Investments. Bhalla said the problem Rajiv Gandhi articulated 30 years ago - that of the Rs 100 spent by the government for the poor, only Rs 15 reached them - has not been addressed and Sonia is pursuing policies that mindlessly feed the blackhole into which public money disappears."You saw where the markets are today and how the currency is doing. The government is seeking foreign investment, unmindful of the fact that more and more Indian corporations are investing overseas. This is a legacy from Nehru onwards, which Sonia Gandhi has taken to new depths. To consider corporations as worthless, as if they add no value to society. There have been many populist spenders, but she takes the first prize for irresponsible populism," he added.Gandhi's defenders will doubtless point to the work UPA has done to improve targeting. UIDAI and the work in progress on moving to a direct cash transfer regime. But if the government recognises that its schemes are leaky on the one hand, is it not then irresponsible to continue spending through the old, inefficient channels, her critics ask.In fact, so entrenched and mainstream has her rights-based welfare agenda become, many in power have little patience for questions about their inefficiencies.Political scientist Dipankar Gupta says he was relieved the UPA came to power in 2004 and dealt in the development narrative because he believed that it signalled a gradual departure from identity politics that India remained mired in for a long time."But over time, this kind of spending has become a holy cow because the effect has not been looked into. No proper audit has been done on how the money is being spent. This leads to cynicism whether all of this is a political gimmick. I'm not against government spending. But we need to know how it is being spent and how it can be spent better," Gupta, a distinguished professor at Shiv Nadar University, said.Targetting and audit are not the only problems with the schemes championed by Gandhi. The centralised template, argues economist Bibek Debroy, goes against the vision of decentralisation and Panchayati Raj that Rajiv Gandhi spelt out many decades ago."If you are concerned about the social sector, those challenges are effectively dealt at the state level or even at the district level. The challenge of say infant mortality in Kerala is very different from that of Chhattisgarh. So give the money to the states or the panchayats. But please don't devise a centralised scheme to do it," he said.Gandhi's rights-based approached, derived from the Sen-Dreze school of thought, and her apparent commitment to welfare, is perhaps most informed by her upbringing in the welfarist liberal democracies of Europe.Debroy says the legacy of UPA will be "condemned by posterity the way we today condemn the economics of 1960s and 1970s". "Some of these things are very hard to reverse. UPA policies have set back India's development by at least 20 years," he said.Gandhi's son and Congress heir apparent Rahul Gandhi famously believes no one person on a white horse can come and solve all of India's problems. For better or for worse, his mother did not shy away from trying.