Reserve labor, unreserved politics: dignified encroachments under India's national rural employment guarantee act

Abstract

The rural proletariat constitute a substantial proportion of the global poor. Leading better lives is central to their political practices. In this paper, I aim to elaborate the political practices that attend to these aspirations, interrogations and contests. I examine existing approaches to studying political practices of the rural proletariat. I do this with a focus on India, where the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is in force since 2005. I locate the program against the backdrop of neoliberal transformations in India. I then examine the ways in which the rural proletariat engage with the program, even when other opportunities in the agricultural sector are available. Based on these examinations, I argue that the practices spawned by the program are to be understood as ‘encroachments’ into the extant social customs, norms and habits of rural India. This perspective, I contend, is more fruitful than locating the rural proletariat's engagement with the NREGA as a coping strategy or a tactic of resistance against rural elites. The data which this paper draws on include official sources, in-depth interviews with workers in rural Bihar and West Bengal and ethnographic observations.

Keywords:

• rural proletariat
• work
• encroachments

I would like to thank Barbara Harriss-White, David Gellner and James Holston, as well as participants in workshops at Berkeley and Oxford. As ever, I remain grateful to my hosts and interlocutors in Araria and Maldah districts in eastern India for invaluable insights. The usual disclaimers apply.

Notes

¹1 USD = ’18 in terms of purchasing power parity.

²A household is classified as ‘marginal’ if it owns less than one hectare of land: marginal farmers are extremely livelihood-insecure, often hiring out their labor to other, wealthier farmers.

³Further evidence is provided in Sainath (2011a and 2011b).

⁴‘Cultivators’ refers to those who cultivate land that is owned or held by them.

⁵‘Agricultural laborers’ are those who work on lands held or owned by others in exchange for wages in cash, kind or a combination of both.

⁶‘Marginal workers’ are workers who find employment for up to six months in a year. By contrast, ‘main workers' are workers who find employment for more than six months in a year.

⁷Outside Parliament, the virulent opposition to the program by fiscal conservatives constrained the terms of the debate as to whether it was fiscally sustainable or not, and whether it was the best means of addressing rural poverty. These debates have been aptly summarized in Drèze (2011).

⁸In a politically astute move, the wage component of the program is met by the Central Government's funds, but the unemployment allowance component needs to be borne by the State Government. This was expected to incentivize the State Government to ensure that job applications are fulfilled within the prescribed time limit.

⁹1 crore = 10 million.

¹⁰India's National Budget Expenditure in 2012–2013 was calculated at 1430825 crores.

¹¹While these figures are impressive, it is also important to bear in mind that, throughout India, members of as few as 2 million households were able to secure the full 100 days of employment with the program during each of the years.

¹²Interestingly enough, very little employment was forthcoming during the period from September to November when few agricultural operations were implemented. This phenomenon remains to be studied.

¹³The rest was pocketed by the ensemble of actors that included the Post Master, Rozgar Sevak, and the elected representative who claimed to expedite the payment of the wages in the first place.

¹⁴7.5 bighas = 1 hectare in Bengal regions (3 bighas = 1 acre = 0.4 hectare). Note that there are enormous variations throughout South Asia.

¹⁵However, Rodgers and Rodgers (1979, 2009) note for their study villages in Purnea, a district that abuts Araria to the south, that migration peaked during winter and lasted up to April, the wheat harvesting season. In either case, it appears that the cultivation cycles in Punjab influenced – till recently – the seasonal patterns of migration from north Bihar.

¹⁶I happened to be in Sargana Panchayat in April 2010 and bade farewell to a group of nearly 30 men on the 15th.

¹⁷During the months of October, December and January, for instance, there are no significant agricultural operations in the State. Yet few NREGA works were offered during that period in the four years under consideration.

¹⁸A term used by conservative political leaders to describe members of the so-called ‘untouchable’ community. Most political activists prefer the term ‘Dalit’. Obviously, however, Nevi Rishi's use of the conservative term does little to curtail the sense of anger he feels when confronted with discrimination.

¹⁹Hanging out, Sargana Ward 1 Musahar tola (West), 2 April 2010.

²⁰I lived in Rahimpur from 10 December 2009 to 17 December 2009, and again from 1 February 2010 to 14 February 2010.

²¹I first met him on 3 February; interviews and ‘hanging out’ with neighbours and co-workers till 10 February.

²²Hanging out, Ghandy's chai kiosk, Rahimpur, 6 February 2010.

²³This was only one of the four kiosks in the village (and the one preferred by laborers because the chai cost the least here).

²⁴This data is to be considered alongside Guha's (1996) warning that labor days should not be counted as homogeneous.

²⁵I lived in Sargana from 8 to 30 January 2010, and again from 14 March to 17 April 2010.

²⁶Hanging out, Musahar tola (West) machan, Sargana Ward 1, 23 March 2010.

²⁷Hanging out, Musahar tola (West) machan, Sargana Ward 1, 2 April 2010.

²⁸That the agriculturalists had been at the forefront of the emancipatory struggles which had politicized questions of social equality and dignity (Frankel 1989, Roy 2013, Witsoe 2013) was not lost on my interlocutors. But there was a sense of betrayal when the agriculturalists persisted with socially treating them as ‘untouchable’.

²⁹Hanging out, Musahar tola (West) machan, Sargana Ward 1, April 4, 2010.

³⁰There had been a few instances of permanent migration among the wealthier households in the village, but none from this conspicuously impoverished hamlet.

³¹4 February 2010. Hanging out at Manhir ul Islam's paddy field.

³²This use of fictive kinship is rather interesting. While it is usual for employees to invoke such relations vis-à-vis their employers, it is much less common for employers to address their employees in such respectful terms. This term was very commonly used by the Muslim agriculturalists in Rahimpur to refer to their Munda laborers.

³³Hart (1991) alerts us to the ways in which women laborers were able to relate to their employers and other influential people in far more antagonistic ways than their male counterparts did. The evidence here seems to be exactly the opposite.

³⁴It is true that there is an emerging category of households benefitting from rural non-farm livelihoods: indeed, the proportion of such households in a district such as Maldah rose from 4 percent in 1991 to 16 percent in 2001 (Government of West Bengal 2007, 98). But by their very nature, these activities are not of a public type, being conducted from their homes.

³⁵In following an amended approach to the notion of ‘encroachment’, I am mindful of the fact that workers’ engagement with the NREGA is within the legal remit. It is a program implemented by the Indian state, with which millions of households in rural India seek to engage. What I want to emphasize by referring to the program as an ‘encroachment’ is the manner in which it has enabled the rural poor to claim the public space in their villages without having to conform to exploitative social relations and hierarchical intersubjective frameworks. I am also mindful of the descriptive baggage that the term ‘encroachment’ carries. Across many parts of the world, encroachments are actually enacted by the propertied and the privileged: a study on rural Bihar bears testimony to this (Ekta Parishad and PRAXIS 2009). These encroachments are at the cost of the poor, who are then left with less of the public resources from which to partake. The encroachments I am referring to are directed towards local elites, while drawing on official politics.

Additional information

Indrajit Roy is at the University of Oxford where he is completing a manuscript on Restive subjects: the politics of the poor, due to be published by Cambridge University Press. His core intellectual interests focus on the political sociology of economic transition with a special focus on the ‘emerging markets’ India, Brazil and South Africa. His research is located at the intersection of the the ways in which the poor imagine membership in the political community and, the institutions through which states govern economically, socially and culturally heterogeneous populations.