‘Breaking the backbone of farmers’: contestations in a rural employment guarantee scheme

Abstract

This paper examines narratives about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) to reveal people's interpretations of changes to agrarian relations in Andhra Pradesh. Through narratives, we are able to reveal more than just the material relations of production, unveiling internalised modes of control, how these have come under threat in recent times, and discursive strategies to restore them – albeit in modified form. It argues that the MGNREGA has become a site of ideological contestation, in which the scheme means either an entitlement to government support, or alternatively a threat to existing modes of control that can only be reinstated through the scheme itself.

Keywords:

• MGNREGA
• labour relations
• development programs
• Andhra Pradesh
• subject positions
• subjectivity

This paper was initially presented at the Australian Anthropological Society conference at the University of Western Australia in July 2011. I am grateful to Kirsten Maclean at CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) Ecosystem Sciences and Salim Lakha at the University of Melbourne for their useful feedback on earlier drafts. This research was made possible through an Endeavour research grant from the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education, Commonwealth of Australia, and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. I benefited greatly from the tireless and inspired research assistance of Sushma Reddy, Surekha Thandra and Murthy Pala, and Chiranjeevi Tallapragada at Livelihoods and Natural Resource Management Institute, Hyderabad, for logistical support, and providing statistics about the villages. Finally, my thanks go to the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

Notes

¹The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (or Act) used to be known as the NREGA, changing names in 2009. In the field site, it is known as the NREGA or the ‘scheme’. It is similar to a food for work scheme that was implemented during drought periods, and some respondents also used the term Karavu Pani. The MGNREGA is referred to in this paper using MGNREGA and ‘the scheme’.

²The names of villages are pseudonyms to uphold ethical requirements to protect the identity of informants.

³This account is necessarily brief and I direct readers to Byres (1999), Reddy and Mishra (2009) and Walker (2008) for more details.

⁴Bardhan's classification of rural classes is based on people's relation to labour – a primary determinant of status as wage work is considered debasing. Pure labourers (PL) are individuals who entirely depend on hiring out their labour; labourers plus (L+) cultivate their own marginal land, but are primarily reliant on hiring out their labour for their livelihood; small farmers (SF) work primarily on their own assets, but also engage in some wage work (and may also hire in labour); cultivators (C) work on their own assets and hire in wage labour. Individuals with non-agricultural livelihood portfolios are involved in sectors (such as the service sector), are self-employed or draw a salary and do not engage in agricultural wage labour.

⁵Labour groups were often mixed, and as interviews occurred within the group, we did not always capture what caste or class group the women belonged to. This is reflected in quotes from these interviews which therefore do not have these classifications.

⁶I have provided some indicative description and statistics of the two villages below, but, due to the necessity to obscure features that would identify either village (and thereby respondents), these have been kept necessarily broad.

⁷Scheduled Tribes are also agricultural labourers in Krishnanagar. As I did not have sufficient empirical material that related specifically to scheduled tribes, I have not included them in the analysis.

⁸As a qualitative study, we did not employ methods that would arrive at accurate statistics of landholdings, labour participation and wages. I thank my colleague, Chiranjeevi Tallapragada from LNRMI (Livelihoods and Natural Resource Management Institute) who worked on a separate component of the same project, for the above statistics at the village and district level.

⁹There is no strict correlation between land size and the tendency for farmers to supervise only, rather than working alongside labourers. Farmers with less land (closer to 10 acres) are more likely to also rely on family labour.

¹⁰The idea that the spoils of government should be shared equally between labourers and farmers has also been used to argue in favour of the scheme. De Neve and Carswell (2011) found that labourers saw the [MG]NREGA as their rightful entitlement after the government wrote off the loans of farmers.

¹¹We did not collect data as to the actual profit and loss of farmers. It seems likely that the rise in input costs as noted in section two is making it increasingly difficult to make a profit from agriculture. Some farmers noted, however, that with BT cotton and improved yield, agriculture is still the best way to make money.

Additional information

Tanya Jakimow is a lecturer in Anthropology and an Australian Research Council DECRA (Discovery Early Career Research Award) Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her current research examines how everyday practices of local-level governance influence processes of self and social relations in India and Indonesia. Tanya has previously published in the fields of livelihoods, agrarian change and non-government organisations. Email: [email protected]