No account of the changing social relations in rural India would be complete without at least a cursory reference to the role of the State and its widespread welfare programmes. One such programme was the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), legislated in September 2005 by the United Progressive Alliance government following significant pressure from its Left allies. As it happens, the Act was passed under the stewardship of the Minister of Rural Development Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, a long-term comrade of Lalu Prasad Yadav and one of the founding members of his Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD).
NREGA represented a constitutional commitment on the part of the Indian State to guarantee the “right to work” by providing at least one hundred days of wage employment in a financial year to any household whose members demanded work. By 2009, the programme had been expanded to all 600+ districts of the country. Budget documents suggest that the Government of India spends over 8 billion US dollars annually on this programme, nearly a third of the World Bank’s annual outlay. As a State-owned, well-resourced, demand-driven rights-based programme, NREGA was indeed a bold attempt anywhere in the world to affect a transformative social protection policy.
The fundamental unit of NREGA was the application (“demand” in the official parlance) for work made by an applicant. Employment on an NREGA project would usually entail teams of 10–20 workers carrying out earthworks for the construction of small dams, “excavating” ponds, carrying out afforestation activities, laying non-tarred laterite roads, and the like for about 10–12 days. These works would usually be carried out on public land, but limited works on farms of small and marginal farmers – those who deployed their own household labour for agricultural purposes – were permitted. Works were also allowed on farms owned by Dalits and Adivasis. In some states, wages for workers employed on NREGA projects compared favourably with prevailing market rates.
In a break from all previous public works programmes, NREGA guidelines did not impose any seasonal limitations on the execution of projects. By not restricting projects during the cropping and harvesting season, the programme provided rural labourers opportunities to demand work during the cropping season and allowed workers to engage with the programme at higher wage rates. At the same time, this very provision fuelled fears among farmers that their long-term interests were under siege by an unsympathetic regime. Farmers feared that the programme, by attracting labourers, would fuel shortages in the workforce, increasing costs and reducing agricultural surpluses.
Since its inception, the programme has generated tremendous interest in academic, policy, and activist circles. Scholars have examined the outcomes of the programme in terms of the employment generated, the infrastructure created, the impact of wage rates on household incomes, and on local social relations. Others have highlighted the impediments to the implementation of the policy, particularly drawing attention to the rampant corruption that plagues it. Some writers sympathetic to NREGA have located the policy in the discourse of the right to work and human rights more generally. Others have upheld the programme as an example of the way in which neoliberalism has been contained in India.
More critical authors have also situated NREGA within the “neoliberal turn” of the Indian State, while yet others have sought to theorise the programme as integral to the fabric of postcolonial capitalism in India. This excitement was mirrored somewhat in Sargana while I was undertaking my doctoral research. In the first of many conversations, Nandev Rishi, who lived in the same hamlet as Maturi and Sapuri Rishi, described its importance. Between March and April 2009, Nandev, his wife Saijani, and his family members had all worked on the maize and then the wheat harvests. They had received in-kind payments. On both occasions, as labourers, they received one-ninth of the produce to be divided up among themselves. Nandev calculated the monetary value of their wage to be about 45 rupees per person for each of the 12 days they had been engaged in these operations Further, they were allowed – by custom – to keep the husk of the maize crop for use as fuel. But he also added that there had been no NREGA work offered during that period. His brother suggested that they might have taken up work on an NREGA project had it been introduced during that period.
Once the harvest season was over, Nandev and a group of labourers headed towards northwestern India as they did each year. He had spent a total of six months outside the village. Of these, three months had been in Punjab, split between two trips. One trip was with a group of workers who travelled to Punjab for the transplanting of the paddy saplings (June–July). Another was to harvest them (October). For the remaining three months, he had been in Alwar and Delhi: in Alwar (May/June) he was employed in brick kilns, while in Delhi he had worked as a construction labourer (September). In each of these places, he had received between 100–150 rupees per day. All payments were in cash and made on a daily basis.
In the meantime, Saijani worked with six other women from her hamlet to transplant paddy saplings for 10 farmers. They worked for five days and received payment in cash. She recalled that they had to haggle with the farmer on the last day, although all their dues were cleared eventually. The payments comprised 40 rupees per day for each of the fields they transplanted, as well as a meal containing rice, a piece of gourd, and lentil soup. Later in September, she and her sister-in-law had worked on the jute harvest. They had each received the equivalent of 70 rupees per day, as well as the husk of the jute crop, which was invaluable as fuel.
Nandev returned in October 2009 after the Punjab paddy harvests were completed. The following month, the paddy crop was harvested locally. Nandev recalled being reluctant to work on the harvesting operations because of the temperamental attitude of the agriculturalists. Saijani was even less keen to work on the harvest, he said, because of the way the agriculturalists’ wives scorned her for allegedly emulating them by wearing sarees instead of the ghagharas that were associated with their community. Nevertheless, they both worked, in a group of 12, for an agriculturalist, who remunerated them with, as before, one-ninth of the harvest. Nandev Rishi calculated that the monetary value of what they received was about 50 rupees per day per person.
When employment was offered under NREGA in January 2010, Nandev, along with eight other men and women in his hamlet, came to work in the programme. They worked for four days, after which the project was declared complete. They were each paid 60 rupees per day but had to wait nearly a month for the money. Much of the time between the completion of the programme and the final disbursal of the wages was spent quarrelling with the bureaucrats responsible for the timely disbursal of payments.
In March 2010, just before our meeting, work had been initiated on another project. Despite the bitter experience of the previous time, Nandev Rishi and four members of his extended family sought work under the programme. This time, they worked on it for nine days at a stretch. Saijani and the other family members told me they were pleased that they no longer needed to work for the agriculturalists. They did not have to bend to anyone’s orders, they said. Nandev’s uncle, 53-year-old Shanichar Rishi, agreed with his nephew that the programme, despite its messiness, had done a lot of good for workers. He continued, “Thanks to this programme, at least we don’t have to dance to other people’s tunes in the village.”
During the many evenings I spent in Nandev’s neighbourhood, I observed many farmers coming to request labour to help with their maize and wheat harvest operations. Unfailingly, the residents of the hamlet would offer the visitors chai. They would refuse. There would be some general conversation. The visitors would make their request. They would be ignored. My interlocutors in the hamlet tried to assure me that they did agree to many requests, and that they had nothing against farmers in general. It was just specific farmers that they did not want to work with, they said. They were willing to work with farmers who respected them (“hamari ijjat karte hain”), but not with those who insisted on calling them by their caste names. One evening, 51-year-old Bhukhan Rishi lost his patience with my relentless inquiries about how they decided who to work for:
Did you see how many people accepted our offer of chai? Is this the way to treat us when we have been so hospitable? Just because they consider us untouchable? Tell me, if this is the way they treated you where you live, would you ever work for them?
Bhukhan’s comments nailed the issue for me. By asking me whether I would work in the circumstances to which he and others in his community were subjected, he exemplified what they had been saying about them intending to lead their lives in accordance with notions of dignity. His outburst suggested an impulse among agricultural labourers to turn away from economic relations that are embedded in hierarchical social relations. It pointed to the claims of social equality that are important to my interlocutors in Sargana and the denial of those claims by the locality’s agriculturalists.
Excerpted with permission from Indians on the Move, Indrajit Roy, Zaheeb Ajmal, and Ankur Jaiswal, Yoda Press.
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