THE eminent economist, Arjun Sengupta, presumably surprised everybody when, in the report on ‘conditions of work and promotion of livelihood in the unorganized sector’, he estimated that 77 per cent of India’s population lived on less than Rs 20 a day.¹ On the basis of data from the 61st round of the National Sample Survey (NSS) 2004-2005, Sengupta, then Chairman of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS), showed that an overwhelming 836 million people in India were ‘poor and vulnerable’. Interestingly, he unveiled these ‘gloomy’ figures on the condition of India’s population at the very juncture when the catch phrase ‘India Rising’ was increasingly popular in the dominant discourse and when advocates of economic reform sought to establish that India was shining as its growth rate had begun to rise.

Recent data from Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) 2011, demonstrate that irrespective of how the numbers are sliced and diced, 49 per cent of rural households show signs of poverty and 51 per cent of households engage in manual (casual) labour as the main source of income.² The same census also reveals that one out of three families living in villages is landless and depends on manual labour for livelihood and the families who depend on manual casual labour for livelihood are deemed as deprived.³

The categorization of poor, or rather, the targeting the poor by formulating the concept of a poverty line has, however, increasingly become a contested idea in contemporary academic discourse. Questions are raised about the very methods of measurement of poverty and construction of a poverty line.⁴ Whether or not the rate and extent of poverty is increasing seems to most concern those who are in favour of poverty estimation, arguably in order to eradicate it. Nevertheless, irrespective of whether and how much poverty levels have actually declined, the government has introduced a set of rights based poverty alleviation programmes, such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and National Food Security Act.

 

Along with the Right to Information and Right to Education, the emergence of a ‘New Rights Agenda’ that legislates some kinds of guarantee to various socio-economic entitlements (like employment) is indeed a novel shift in governance of poverty in India. While there is a scholarly consensus that these legislations, at least in design, are progressive and innovative in terms of governance,⁵ questions have often been raised about their efficacy, with some suggesting that ‘the direct impact has been limited.’⁶ Ruparelia, though pointing out some of its risks, forcefully emphasizes that new laws have helped ‘devise innovative governance mechanisms that enable citizens to see the state and provide fresh incentives for political coalition’, while Jenkins believes that these, particularly the MGNREGA, ‘represent an important step towards a meaningful social safety net.’⁷ A more ambitious claim based on the MGNREGA in Tamil Nadu is that it has produced ‘significant transformative outcomes for rural labourers, such as pushing up rural wage levels, enhancing low caste workers bargaining power in the labour market and reducing their dependency on high caste employers.’⁸

 

While pursuing such scholarly analyses, it is also worth asking just how innovative these welfare interventions actually are. Through mapping the trajectory of transformation of rural employment, I argue that the new rights agenda, especially the MGNREGA, though providing some legal scope to pursue the demand of employment a little further, is as such not innovative as far as the essence of its promises are concerned. Policy makers had undertaken similar development policies, along with other major policy formulations on redistributive justice and enhancement of production, in order to create employment by utilizing ‘idle labour’ ever since the constitution of the Planning Commission in 1951.

The actual intent of this effort, however, was, as the first chapter of the first five year plan 1951 mentions, to effectively mobilize ‘all the available resources at minimum social cost’ and, subsequently, to increase ‘the productivity of labour so that larger employment can be provided at rising levels of real income.’ But, anticipating the possible risk of a breakdown ‘on account of excessive pressure of money incomes on available supplies, the planners emphasized ‘the need for relying as far as possible on voluntary labour and using money mainly as a means of attracting and organizing such labour.’⁹

 

The issue of employment generation, as the government has proclaimed, is actually a secondary component though these special programmes undertaken by the government are termed as employment generation programmes. The first five year plan had actually laid greater emphasis on the productivity of labour, or on the subsequent productivity of capital, instead of focusing on employment generation, when it called for ‘relying as far as possible on voluntary labour and using money mainly as a means of attracting and organizing such labour.’

Until 1984, the government thus never committed to providing employment to all for a certain period in the year. It just aimed at generating a certain number of man days (300-400 million) of employment in rural areas every year for creating durable assets. This is to say the government did not even fix who among the rural people are to be given employment for which period of time. Instead, it specified and fixed the level of social cost that it could bear. It seems that the main aim of the government was to recreate or restructure agriculture related infrastructure by utilizing cheap and idle labour at minimum social cost. Hence, analysis of programmes like Food for Work and NREP seldom focused on their role in employment generation, but primarily emphasized only one component, that is, whether the funds released by the government were being utilized.

 

Despite having a substantial impact, the government’s evaluation notes, in terms of ‘stabilization of wages, containing prices of food grains and the creation of a wide variety of community assets’, that the NREP programme ‘has apparently lacked a direct focus on the target group population’, i.e. the landless and the poorest among the poor.¹⁰ In fact, the domain of policy regime has its own dynamic pathways whereby not only are the newer policies made but their legitimacy, coherence and strength also continuously shaped.

On the basis of critical discussion and reviews of the earlier policies like NREP, and the Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme (RLEGP), another new policy was formulated in 1983-4 ‘with an object of providing employment of up to 100 days every year to at least one member of every landless household’ and of creating more assets ‘for strengthening the infrastructure so as to meet the growing requirements of the rural economy.’¹¹ The question arises whether there is any linkage between the ‘direct focus on the landless and the poorest among the poor’ and the need ‘for strengthening the infrastructure so as to meet the growing requirements of the rural economy.’

 

Although the problem of unemployment and poverty in rural areas has constantly been a concern of the government, the generation of employment on the part of the government is invariably tied to the project of strengthening the infrastructure required for a growing rural economy. Whether, and how far, the growing rural economy and the strengthened infrastructure could set the ground for enduringly solving the problem of rural unemployment and poverty, and subsequently provide relief to the landless and poor people in the rural areas has, however, rarely been addressed.

Had this question been properly examined, the government might have kept itself away from promulgating newer policies every now and then as a mechanism of governance of the rural poor. It is presumably also an established fact today that political leaders, even at the rural grassroots, creatively utilize the policies and schemes or the purpose of local level governance. My earlier research in two villages in the district of Hooghly in the period of 2006-2009, reveals that the then ruling Left Front, particularly the CPI(M) and its leaders, could strengthen their party network and mass base at the grassroots by utilizing various policies undertaken both by the central and state government.¹²

Why I propose that these kinds of development programmes are, in the main, meant for serving the interest of the propertied class is simply due to the fact that the landholding class does seize the main benefit, i.e. the durable assets created as a corollary to these policies. Conversely, the labouring class who at best only obtain wage employment rarely benefits in the longer run. The district level leader of a reputed national NGO candidly admitted: ‘The section of peasants or farmers who at least own some amount of agricultural land are getting benefited by means of implementation of these programmes since they could utilize the effects of the durable assets produced in course of implementation of the same. We have not been able to generate such options for the landless poor.’

 

The government itself did not, it seems, accept the conjecture that agricultural growth would ensure employment benefits, and the implementation of development programmes would anyway aid the land-poor in their search for livelihoods. If they did, they would not need to frame ever larger number of policies aimed at poverty alleviation in every approaching period. Interestingly, from the sixth to eighth five year plan (1981-1995), when the annual growth rate of agriculture was its highest, i.e. 3.5 per cent/year, the government had prioritized development measures in order to curb the rate of poverty and employment though, simultaneously, it also expected ‘to see progressive reduction in the incidence of poverty and unemployment.’¹³

In a democratic country like India where the intended direction of planning is to achieve a number of diverse goals like ‘growth, removal of poverty, modernization and achievement of self-reliance’, the government is clear in its intention to appease both sets of main classes in rural areas. The desired appeasement of two sets of classes at one and the same time, through an increase of the growth rate in agriculture and implementation of low-range poverty alleviation programmes, actually seems to be an attempt on the part of the government to maintain the status quo, if not a bias, towards the rural propertied classes.

 

While gains from labour productivity primarily accrue to the landholding class, mechanization of cultivation as well as land development and commercialization of agriculture, tends to benefit the commercial classes involved in trading agricultural inputs and crop outputs. Landless agricultural labourers do, however, get more jobs in the initial period, but remain vulnerable due to the uncertainty of erratic market forces and growing mechanization. This suggests that an increase in growth, the primary aim of the state, essentially leads to policy moves that enhance production mainly in the interest of the landed classes. Likewise, although the implementation of poverty alleviation programmes benefit the rural landless poor to at least some extent in the slack period of the year, they actually serve the interests of the landholding classes by means of increasing the productivity of land, labour and capital.

John Harriss, who is otherwise critical of the intentions of the government’s poverty alleviation programmes, particularly of the MGNREGA, categorizing it as nothing but ‘the management of poverty’, recently commented that a ‘social audit can have a powerful impact.’ The veteran scholar asserts that the social audit aspect of the scheme ‘promises a new kind of democratic participation and a way for ordinary people to hold the state to account.’¹⁴ He is likely correct in his assertion as, it is a truism to say that, a social audit must ensure democratic participation and make the state more accountable. The point is whether the concerned people of a particular society are at all able to conduct a social audit for its very purpose.

Actually, a social audit is always subject to assurance of participation of the entire people. It is most unlikely that in a stratified society like ours audits have ever been social in nature and essence. The issues of caste, class, religion and gender always negatively affect the very purpose of these kinds of efforts. For instance, anyone familiar with scholarly work on the functioning of the gram sansad could easily gauge the importance of the operational dynamics of various inherent social barriers. Another question that still remains largely unaddressed is the way in which this kind of enactment, including the social audit, could strengthen state processes in rural areas. In other words, the point is to examine the process by which the state is changing, as Chopra says, ‘in and through these porous interactions between the state and society during the policy making process’ and also in the course of its implementation.¹⁵

 

To sum up, the trajectory of the enactment of the MGNREGA tellingly reveals that what is enacted in the name of employment assurance is nothing new but a continuation of age-old policies of employment generation intended for ‘idle’ labour for a few days in a year to create durable social assets in rural India. Also, such programmes of employment generation have all through been aimed at reinforcing economic growth which policy makers believe address all issues of social and economic inclusion in the country. What is new in this enactment, however, is the government’s urge to motivate the people to take the initiative for their own benefit instead of sitting ‘idly’ by in expectation of government dole or other kinds of ameliorative actions. This means the ‘people must operate’, of course legally, and ‘the government must cooperate’ through the use of its technology of governance. As a result the government could, on the one hand, bypass, at least in part, its liability to provide employment to rural labourers. Simultaneously, as Scott argues, ‘the state’s attempt to make a society legible’, in terms of gathering knowledge ‘about its subjects, their wealth, their landholding...’ and, in our context, about the rate of unemployment, gets achieved.¹⁶

 

In its effort to assure employment, the government maintains that it would attempt to generate employment under the MGNREGA programme ‘within the limits of its economic capacity’ (MGNREGA Act),¹⁷ implying that the government has sought exemption from its non-compliance with employment legislation in rural areas. Had employment even been recognized as a right, the scenario would not have changed much, as indicated by the fate of other acts like the Minimum Wages Act (1948). My ethnography in rural West Bengal reveals many instances of non-compliance of minimum wages for agricultural labour during both the Left Front and TMC rule.¹⁸ The MGNREGA seems to have very limited potential with regard to employment generation in rural areas though this kind of enactment of guarantee of employment could often initiate and strengthen political and social transformations in the respective terrain.

 

* This article is part of my book project tentatively titled, ‘Poverty, Policy and Power in India: The Question of Employment’. I wish to gratefully acknowledge the Danish Agency for Science Technology and Innovation for a postdoctoral research grant and the ICSSR, EZC for granting me a book writing fund in the year 2015.

Footnotes:

1. Arjun Sengupta, ‘Report on Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganized Sector’, National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector, 2008. Downloadable at http://nceuis.nic.in/conditions_ of_ workers_ Sep_ 2007.

2. See The Times of India, 4 July 2015. Though the focus of SECC was equally on caste, like other socio-economic classes in the 2011 Census, the findings on caste have not been published due to a fear of social upheaval.

3. See, The Times of India, 3 July 2015. According to that census, the total number of families in India is 24.39 crore, of which 17.91 crore live in villages.

4. Utsa Patnaik, ‘Neo-liberalism and Rural Poverty in India’, Economic and Political Weekly 42(30), 28 July 2007, p. 3132; Utsa Patnaik, ‘A Critical Look at Some Propositions on Consumption and Poverty’, Economic and Political Weekly XLV(6), 6 February 2010, p. 74; John Harriss, ‘State of Injustice: The Indian State and Poverty’, Distinguished Lecture Series, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2014.

5. Mihir Shah, ‘Two Years of NREGA: The Road Ahead’, Economic and Political Weekly 43(08), 2008, pp. 41-50; Jean Dreze, ‘Employment Guarantee and the Right to Work’, in Ritika Khera (ed), The Battle for Employment Guarantee. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2011, pp. 21-39.

6. Sanjay Ruparelia, ‘India’s New Rights Agenda: Genesis, Promises, Risks’, Pacific Affairs 86(3), 2013, pp. 569-590; John Harriss, op. cit., 2014; Rob Jenkins, ‘Land, Rights and Reform in India’, Pacific Affairs 86(3), 2013, pp. 591-812.

7. Sanjay Ruparelia, ibid., 2013, p. 569; Rob Jenkins, ibid., 2013.

8. Grace Carswell and Geert De Neve, ‘MGNREGA in Tamil Nadu: A Story of Success and Transformation?’ Journal of Agrarian Change 14(4), 2014, pp. 564-585.

9. GOI, First Five Year Plan, ‘First Chapter’, Planning Commission Report (1951-1956). Downloadable at www.planningcommission. gov.in

10. GOI, Seventh Five Year Plan, ‘Chapter 2’, Vol. 2, Planning Commission Report (1985-1990). Downloadable at www.planning commission.gov.in

11. Ibid.

12. Dayabati Roy, Rural Politics in India: Political Stratification and Governance in West Bengal. Cambridge University Press, Delhi, 2013.

13. Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister of India, in her foreward to the Report of the Sixth Five Year Plan (1981-1985).

14. John Harriss, op. cit., 2014, p.16.

15. Deepta Chopra, ‘Policy Making in India: A Dynamic Process of Statecraft’, Pacific Affairs 84(1), 2011, pp. 89-107.

16. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1998.

17. GOI, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (2005). Downloadable at www.nrega.nic.in

18. Dayabati Roy, op. cit., 2013.