MANY VISITORS to the northern Indian city of Lucknow visit a gigantic eighteenth-century Indo-Islamic monument in the middle of the old city called the Bada Imambara.

It is unusual among buildings from that period, being neither a fort nor a palace, nor a mosque nor a mausoleum. Guides tell many stories about it inflected, no doubt, to suit the tastes of the audience—Abhijit was told it was a part of the kingdom’s defense against the encroaching British Raj, despite not looking remotely like a fort.

There is one story about this project that stuck in Abhijit’s memory. It is claimed the project took much longer than it should have because what the workers built during the day, the elites destroyed at night. The idea was to give the elites, who also lived off agriculture and were therefore starving like the rest, a way to earn enough to survive. Being aristocrats, they would rather die than let it be known to the public that they had fallen into such dire straits, hence the artifice of the nightly effort.

Whatever one makes of the wanton snobbery that made this necessary, and indeed whether or not it actually happened, the story makes an important point. It is easy to forget, especially in a crisis, the need to protect as far as possible the dignity of those being helped. Asaf-ud-Daula, to his credit, did not. Or at least that’s how history remembers him.

We will argue that this tension between cash and care should be one of the central concerns in the design of social policy. In the current debate, at one extreme there are those who believe the best we can do for people who have not flourished in the market economy is to hand them some cash and walk away, leaving them to find their own way in the world. At the other extreme stand those who have little faith in the ability of the poor to take care of themselves, and as a result either want to abandon them to their fate or intrude heavily into their lives, restricting their choices, punishing those who do not fall in line. One side acts as if the self-esteem of the beneficiaries of public programs is not an issue; the other side either does not care or believes it is the price they need to pay if they want public help. And yet the desire to be respected is often a reason why support for social interventions is lacking even among those who need them, and also a reason why these policies fail. In this chapter we explore the implications of this particular perspective on the design of social policies.