Abstract
India went through a rights revolution of sorts beginning in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. This included the enactment of the Right to Information Act in 2005, the Forest Rights Act in 2006 and the Right to Education Act in 2009. Arguably, the most ambitious of these laws is the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) enacted in 2005, which is the subject of the book under review authored by two veterans of India’s institutional reforms: Rob Jenkins and James Manor. The authors rightly refer to the NREGA as one of the developing world’s most ambitious anti-poverty initiatives, which provides for a ‘right to work’ by guaranteeing 100 days of work annually to every rural household.
This is a multi-scalar study that captures the politics and policymaking processes at the national level (Chapter 2). It offers a fine-grained analysis of NREGA implementation at the state, district and sub-district levels in the neighbouring states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh (Chapters 3 to 5), a panoramic view of NREGA’s impacts on material well-being and political efficacy of poor people (Chapter 6), and a discussion of the implications of NREGA for the debates over competing visions of development in India and beyond (Chapters 7 to 8).
With the intention of reaching out to the academics, policy makers and practitioners, the authors helpfully define politics as the ‘interplay of actors, institutions, and ideas in the pursuit, distribution, and exercise of power’ (p. 5). The authors further disaggregate power into forms of ‘coercion, persuasion or exchange’. Similarly, they define poverty not just as a state of ‘severe shortages of assets and incomes, but also a debilitating deficiency of opportunities and capabilities’ (p. 7). While these broader perspectives on politics and poverty will be familiar to the readers of this journal, a surprisingly large number of commentators, including many policy wonks, tend to have miserably narrow views of both politics and poverty. Such narrow views, as the authors ably demonstrate, prevent some policy analysts from seeking a proper understanding of NREGA and other social safety net provisions. While addressing these often confused concepts in theoretically nuanced ways, the authors present their arguments in an extremely accessible prose that very effectively captures the political dynamics related to NREGA.
The book makes a number of important arguments: first, based on surveys in the two states studied, extensive field research and the findings of research studies by other scholars, the authors demonstrate that, despite its many failures, NREGA has improved the lives of tens of millions of poor and marginalized people. Even so, they argue that NREGA’s accomplishments cannot be assessed fully without recognizing its political aims and implications. Consider, for instance, the anticipation by the proponents of NREGA that the discontent generated by its poor implementation would prompt the assertion of citizenship rights, as long as there exist appropriate institutional means of channelling such grievances. On a related note, the authors cite several examples where NREGA wages allowed relatively greater autonomy for individuals implicated in relations of social and political subjugation because of their economic dependence on dominant actors.
Second, the authors utilize their analysis of the politics of the enactment and implementation of NREGA to push back against the common refrain that the Indian state is increasingly captured by purveyors of crony capitalism. They argue that NREGA and other similar rights laws are a testimony that the advocates of the poor have been able to carve out political spaces within the Indian state. At the same time, the authors do not paint a rosy picture of NREGA’s institutional arrangements. For instance, they present a nuanced analysis of the several procedures meant to instil accountability and transparency, which focus too much at the local level when in fact the most important decisions are often taken at the district level. Similarly, within local government, NREGA is shown to have led to the centralization of power and authority in the hands of the sarpanch, the village council heads, who are responsible for the upkeep of records and for coordinating with government officials.
The evidence presented in the book makes two types of arguments about the broader theoretical and institutional implications of NREGA. First, the authors show that vesting significant decision-making powers in the hands of local governments have the salutary effects of strengthening and further legitimizing the apparatus of local governance, including at the village level. Second, they demonstrate that NREGA and other rights laws that India has experimented with over the past decade or so, have given birth to a hybrid regime of ‘governance rights’ that fuse together social and economic rights on the one hand and civil and political rights on the other. Governance rights not only bring the two together but foster mutual reinforcement of these two types of rights.
The book reflects a number of important methodological/analytical judgements on the part of the authors. First, instead of covering a ‘representative’ set of states or sites, the authors justify their selection of subnational cases on the basis that, unlike some of the other major northern and eastern Indian states, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh have escaped the large-scale victimization and delegitimization of state-level bureaucracy (for methodological arguments about comparative analyses, see De Melo, Ng’ethe, & Manor, 2012; Kashwan, 2017). Considering the overwhelming importance of state-level ‘bureaucracy’ in the implementation of NREGA, the selection of states is both relevant and appropriate. Second, the authors call out the shallowness of a number of arguments, such as Bhagwati and Panagariya’s advocacy of mean-tested mechanisms in which NREGA beneficiaries must meet certain minimum income threshold (p. 209). The basic tenets of new institutional economics that Bhagwati and Panagariya are well aware of, would suggest that in societies with grave inequalities and poor rule of law, mean-tested mechanisms are significantly more vulnerable to elite capture compared to the universal provisions of manual labour opportunities available under the NREGA. Similarly, the authors also reject Shurjit Bhalla’s ‘ludicrous’ claim that over 82 per cent of NREGA benefits went to the non-poor (p. 225). The practice of making substantiated and pointed refutations of such shallow arguments is worth emulating, especially in the field of development studies and institutional reforms. These areas of research have real-world consequences too significant to be left to the mercies of sugar-coated critiques that may not be readily apparent to policy makers and practitioners.
Third, the book is an exemplar of the rapidly developing methodology of political ethnography, which stands apart from the ethnographic method developed in anthropology. Political ethnography offers fine-grained ways of understanding and analysing individual and group behaviours, without losing sight of sociopolitical constraints and the higher level political processes. Examples of innovative conceptual development include the authors’ analysis of the pathways through which the NREGA beneficiaries came to understand the notions of rights, even though initially they understood NREGA-linked job opportunities as a ‘legitimate claim’ that they had on the state (p. 72). While the notion of legitimate claim draws on a moral economy framework, ‘rights’ portend citizens’ inclination to engage in stronger bargaining with their political representatives with the intent of holding the state to account (pp. 76–77).
One of the best manifestations of political ethnography is the authors’ classification and analysis of the ‘best case’ versus ‘worst case’ NREGA districts within a state. The argument is that political parties and the top leadership select the ‘best case’ and ‘worst case’ districts with a careful assessment of a number of sociopolitical and institutional variables (pp. 158–162). These analyses bring forth the contingent effects of politics on programmatic outcomes. I wish the authors had further developed this at a conceptual level. This would have enabled a sharper analysis of the lessons to be drawn from the differences between the left of centre UPA government’s first and second terms. Additionally, the clarity of the book’s arguments would have been helped by some reorganizing of the text. As it is, the evidence about the material and political effects and implications of NREGA are scattered across the entire second half of the book. Use of tables and charts earlier, and more frequently, in the text would have allowed for more effective presentation of the insightful findings from the authors’ survey, along with the evidence from other studies.
Scholars, researchers and commentators of development policies and programmes, political economy, and institutional reforms should not miss this remarkable volume full of nuggets of wisdom and cautionary notes for those who are driven by the urge to draw unambiguous conclusions. While there is no cause for romanticizing NREGA’s accomplishments, the authors’ contextualized, nuanced and balanced analyses will help the reader understand and appreciate the clarity of purpose and sharpness of vision of those who fought to bring about and help implement this multifaceted law. As India struggles with rising inequalities, NREGA and other social protection programmes remain an important source of hope for a more inclusive India. This volume is an important contribution to our ongoing reflections about the Indian state, society and its ever more complex political economies.