Inclusive Development Through Guaranteed Employment: India’s MGNREGA Experiences

334 Pages·2022·6.57 MB·English

by  Ashok Pankaj

India Studies in Business and Economics
Ashok Pankaj
Inclusive
Development
Through
Guaranteed
Employment
India’s MGNREGA Experiences
India Studies in Business and Economics
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Ashok Pankaj
Inclusive Development
Through Guaranteed
Employment
India’s MGNREGA Experiences
Ashok Pankaj
Council for Social Development
New Delhi, India
ISSN 2198-0012 ISSN 2198-0020 (electronic)
India Studies in Business and Economics
ISBN 978-981-15-7442-9 ISBN 978-981-15-7443-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7443-6
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Dedicated to
Mahatma Gandhi
The Apostle of Dignity of Labour
Preface
The idea of providing employment-based relief through public works programme,
a practice of a modern welfare state, is not new to India. In The Arthasashta,1 the
famous ancient Indian treatise on statecraft, Kautilya, the saint philosopher advisor of
King Chanakya, had famously advised his king: “In the happiness of his subjects lies
the king’s happiness; in their welfare his welfare”, and then, gave concrete sugges-
tion to “undertake food-for work-programme such as building forts and irrigation
works” (p. 130), for providing relief to the people, especially to mitigate their diffi-
culties during frequent and devastating famines. In the medieval period, Sher Shah
Suri embedded Kautilya’s ideas and built massive networks of national highways,
rest houses (Sarai) for travellers and irrigation canals, which generated large-scale
employment for the poor people, often during droughts and famines.
In modern times, the British colonial government instituted public works
programme through elaborate Famine Code, as a part of state’s welfare obligation to
provide relief to the poor during droughts and famines, which were quite frequent
and were often devastating. Back home, in Great Britain, there was “Poor Laws”,
codified between 1587 and 1598, to provide assistance to women, children, elder
and handicapped through cash, and to able-bodied individuals through wage works
in public works programme.
In the twentieth century, Mahatma Gandhi, an apostle of dignity of labour, elevated
the idea of the right to work to a moral proposition. For Gandhi right to [sic] work was
an essence of living a moral life, defined it in terms of unity of mind and body that
is not to be given, but to be earned as a moral duty of every person to live a dignified
life. Though it is difficult to say that the right-to-work programme in India has been
designed on the ideals and values of Gandhi, his idea of dignity of labour provides
unimpeachable defence of Employment Guarantee Scheme, amidst increasing attack
from the protagonists of cash transfer programme.
The Government of India continued with the policy of providing relief through
public works-based employment generation programmes in the post-Independent
1 Rangarajan, L.N. ed. (1987). Kautilya The Arthashastra (New Delhi: Penguin Books).
vii
viii Preface
period. The Directive Principles of State Policy2 of the Indian Constitution provided
the mandate. Article 41 lays down: “The State shall, within the limits of its economic
capacity and development, make effective provision for securing right to work, to
education and to public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sickness and
disablement, and in other cases of underserved want” (p. 48). Article 43 spells out
some other provisions related to economic rights: “The State shall endeavour to
secure, by suitable legislation or economic organisation or in any other way, to all
workers, agricultural, industrial or otherwise, work, a living wage, conditions of work
ensuring a decent standard of life…” (p. 49). These Articles were preceded by an
omnibus provision in Article 39 (a) that stated: “The State shall, in particular, direct
its policy towards securing that the citizens men and women equally, have the right
to an adequate means to livelihood…” (p. 48).
Nudged by the electoral and political promise of Garibi Hatao by Indira
Gandhi-led Congress Party, public works-based employment generation programmes
acquired a new impetus in the 1970s and became a principal instrument of mitigating
rural poverty. Since then, India has experimented with legends of rural employment
generation programmes, including a rights-based employment programme in the
state of Maharashtra. Amidst successive droughts in 1971–72, 1972–73 and 1973–
74, the Maharashtra government launched the Maharashtra Employment Guarantee
Scheme (MEGS) through an executive fiat in 1972 and elevated it to a legal right
through an Act of the state legislature, i.e. Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Act,
1975, the first of its kind experiment in India.
The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act 2005, (NREGA), later on rightly
renamed as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005,
is culmination of India’s experiments in public works-based employment genera-
tion programme. It has multiple objectives around its principal objective which is
to provide livelihood security through 100 days of guaranteed wage employment to
every rural household. According to the scope of its objectives, it has been variously
described as poverty alleviation, social security, infrastructure building and participa-
tory development programme. Its scale of operation commands awful applause as the
world’s largest public works programme and the biggest state-sponsored employment
generation programme in a non-communist country. Over one and a half decades of its
implementation, it has achieved, partly or fully, many objectives; some of them were
specifically meant to be fulfilled, and some of them were unintended consequences
of the outcome of employment generation and assets creation, pursued through a
community-centric development process.
Employment generation, although inadequate in terms of the average number of
days per household per annum, less than fifty persondays per household per annum,
except in the year 2009–10, and 2018–19 and against the overwhelming demand for
100 days,3 even more, by most of the poor households, has nonetheless been socially
2 The Constitution of India (2018) (11th edition.) National Law University Delhi and Eastern Book
Company: New Delhi).
3 Jean Dreze shows that in a survey conducted in some of the backward Districts of the country
in 2008, 98 per cent of the workers demanded at least 100 days of employment. See Jean Dreze
Preface ix
inclusive. Landless households, casual labour, SCs, STs, and women workers have
earned the maximum number of persondays. Old and disabled have also got an
opportunity to work. Unprecedented high participation of women, who are otherwise
discriminated in accessing paid employment opportunity in the open labour market,
and equally good participation of a number of old and disabled workers, who are
excluded in the labour market, are significant achievements; the former also from
the viewpoints of correcting gender skewedness in the labour market and the latter
for providing social security to the labour market excluded population.
Various surveys show that wage earnings from the MGNREGA, an additional
source of income, contribute about 10–30 per cent of the total annual household
earnings, depending on the number of days worked by a household and its other
sources of income. It has provided lean season income and subsequent food secu-
rity that prevented such households from consumption-led indebtedness and distress
migration as well. Creation of a huge number of community assets, especially related
to water conservation, land and irrigation and rural connectivity, has filled critical
infrastructural gap and boosted rural economy, with significant multiplier effects,
including on non-MGNREGA worker population. Individual assets, provided to
some of the most vulnerable rural households, have created transformational impacts
on their socio-economic conditions.
The MGNREGA, as one of the largest employers of casual labour, has weak-
ened the monopsonic character of India’s rural labour market, and unleashed various
other labour market effects, to the advantages of the poor and vulnerable workers,
who have now something to fall back. Its planning and implementation processes
have strengthened decentralized participatory development. Community participa-
tion, regular holding of Gram Sabha meetings, social audit, etc., though they are yet
lacking in substance and vitality, have invigorated life in civic body. Social empow-
erment effects of the MGNREGA, especially on women and SC, ST workers have
been robust and quite significant, though they were not among the avowed objectives,
yet not fully unintended.
Of course, these achievements are not flawless. Shortcomings emanate from the
processes of implementation, mainly the weak capacity of the local institutions.
There are some design issues as well. Inter-state and intra-state variations are also
pronounced that has significance for rights-based programme. For, realization of the
rights of a worker is conditioned by the place of his residence. The chance of a
worker getting higher level of employment in a state, with better capacity to create
demand-based employment, is higher.
Nevertheless, cumulative effects of the above achievements are loaded with the
promises of promoting inclusive growth and development by promoting overall
development of India’s most marginalized rural population which is the focus of
this book.
This book is also an attempt to explain Employment Guarantee Scheme (EGS),
drawing on MGNREGA’s experiences, as a component of a strategy of promoting
(2011) “Employment Guarantee and the Right to Work” in Reetika Khera ed. (2011) The Battle for
Employment Guarantee (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).
x Preface
inclusive growth and development, largely in India’s contexts, with promises of suit-
able replication in other similarly placed developing economies, though some recent
and emerging literature show its utilities even for developed economies, say for the
U.S. amidst COVID-19 job loss, and in Latin American countries, as a replace-
ment of their well-appreciated cash transfer programmes. Further, it demonstrates
that notwithstanding India’s much-maligned rural employment and anti-poverty
programmes, a carefully designed programme like the MGNREGA can still make a
difference to the lives of the millions of the poor people.
The idea of a book on inclusive growth and development experiences of Employ-
ment Guarantee Scheme (EGS) originated, rather fortuitously, from an invitation
from the UNCTAD to make a presentation on inclusive development experiences
of India’s MGNREGA, in an expert meeting in Geneva on 27–28 November 2014.
While I had been doing some field-based studies on MGNREGA since 2006–07
and had had the opportunity to observe its implementation in different parts of the
country, this invitation drew my attention towards unexplored dimension which is
inclusive development effects of the EGS. My preliminary drive was further boosted
by yet another invitation from the Social Policy Division of the UN Secretariat
that was organizing an Expert and Inter-Agency Meeting on Implementation of the
Second United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (2008–2017) in Addis
Ababa (Ethiopia) on 27–29 May 2015, with a mandate to provide feedback to the
70th General Assembly that finally came out with Sustainable Development Goals
as global development aspirations. Interestingly, in both the meetings, there was one
invited presentation each on Bolsa Familia, the cash transfer programme of Brazil,
and MGNREGA, Employment Guarantee Scheme of India, a careful decision to
make a comparative assessment of these two different programmes, largely with
similar objectives and ambitions.
By now both India’s MGNREGA and Brazil’s Bolsa Familia had acquired global
attention as two different models of development interventions in two emerging
economies that were struggling with increasing inequalities in post-liberalization
phase. They drew attention for their significant achievements, including in mitigating
inequality in a relatively short period of time and with the promises of possible
replication in other such countries.
Emboldened by the interest shown by the participants of the two conferences and
appreciable comments on my presentations, as well, I ventured to develop the idea
into a monograph. This was indeed an ambitious move and challenging job.
While working on the idea of this book, I greatly benefitted from several discus-
sions with Prof. D. N. Reddy and Prof. Atul Sarma and revised my preliminary draft,
based on discussions with them. It was a challenge to build a coherent conceptual
framework for analysing inclusive growth and development experiences of EGS that
made me to rework on the conceptual framework a couple of times, including a painful
exercise in discarding a major part of the first draft. Prof. Atul Sarma graciously took
the pain to read all the chapters, in fact, some of them twice. His incisive comments
were profoundly useful, and occasionally, drew my attention to some aspects of
the impacts, which, perhaps, I would have missed altogether. Regular discussion