Reserve labor, unreserved politics: dignified encroachments under India's national rural employment guarantee act

Abstract

The rural proletariat constitute a substantial proportion of the global poor. Leading better lives is central to their political practices. In this paper, I aim to elaborate the political practices that attend to these aspirations, interrogations and contests. I examine existing approaches to studying political practices of the rural proletariat. I do this with a focus on India, where the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is in force since 2005. I locate the program against the backdrop of neoliberal transformations in India. I then examine the ways in which the rural proletariat engage with the program, even when other opportunities in the agricultural sector are available. Based on these examinations, I argue that the practices spawned by the program are to be understood as 'encroachments' into the extant social customs, norms and habits of rural India. This perspective, I contend, is more fruitful than locating the rural proletariat's engagement with the NREGA as a coping strategy or a tactic of resistance against rural elites. The data which this paper draws on include official sources, in-depth interviews with workers in rural Bihar and West Bengal and ethnographic observations.

Employment, Poverty and Rights in India

“…The rural women who belong to marginal peasant families in general and to the SC and ST categories in particular are increasingly participating in agriculture, and the public works that emerged sporadically through implementation of the MGNREGA are hardly experiencing any transformation, as Roy (2014 ) has argued. While it is true, as Roy (2014 ) analyses, that rural women's participation in MGNREGA represent no 'rational coping' strategies and tactics of 'everyday resistance', it is also not true as revealed from my analysis, that their actions are 'a series of encroachments into the extant social customs, norms and habits in India', as Roy hypothesizes (22). The increased participation of women in labour market, however, I propose, would not automatically translate into genderjust employment and earnings until and unless some social mechanisms are created to transform the gender-based views.…”

A Consensus Unravels: NREGA and the Paradox of Rules-Based Welfare in India

“…The meanings that workers attach to the NREGA also vary across the localities (Roy, 2014). Although they generally perceived the programme as enabling them to lead dignified lives, the specific ways in which they relate to the programme differ.…”

Relational approaches to poverty in rural India: social, ecological and technical dynamics

“…While the overall thrust of the new relational approaches is on different mechanisms constituting pathways into poverty, some scholars highlight how many social security entitlements are actually policy responses to civil society mobilisations (Khera and Nayak 2011;Drèze and Khera 2017). Emphasising the latter political agency, scholars argue that for the rural poor, development interventions become sites for challenging not only the dominant meanings of poverty and well-being (as discussed above), but also the oppressive social relations such as those based on caste and gender (Jakimow 2015;Roy 2014). For example, examining MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), Roy (2014) suggests that rural workers engage with the scheme to actively challenge caste and class norms in the village, enabled by the declining influence of landowning castes facing an agrarian crisis (that is associated with widespread indebtedness among farmers).…”

“…Emphasising the latter political agency, scholars argue that for the rural poor, development interventions become sites for challenging not only the dominant meanings of poverty and well-being (as discussed above), but also the oppressive social relations such as those based on caste and gender (Jakimow 2015;Roy 2014). For example, examining MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), Roy (2014) suggests that rural workers engage with the scheme to actively challenge caste and class norms in the village, enabled by the declining influence of landowning castes facing an agrarian crisis (that is associated with widespread indebtedness among farmers). Whether such challenges can foster the emergence of alternative imaginaries of development based on 'unthinkable politics', which can fundamentally transform political and policy discourses towards the realisation of comprehensive social justice, remains an open question.…”

“…Moving beyond agricultural productivism, incomes and livelihoods, attention is directed to linkages of workers with the non-farm economy and the expansion of social security nets in an era dominated by neoliberal governance (Drèze and Khera 2017;Walker 2008). Then, rural poverty politics are considered prominently in relation to struggles and negotiations for accessing welfare entitlements by oppressed groups (Roy 2014;Carswell and De Neve 2014;Pattenden 2018). While making this political agency of the poor more visible, the new relational approaches pay less attention to people's engagements with technologies and ecologies in maintaining or transforming (unequal) social relations.…”