Despite the conflict and power politics that come into play, there is tremendous scope for collective action through collaboration with the government, unions, people’s movements and gram sabhas to ensure effective implementation of NREGA
Despite the conflict and power politics that come into play, there is tremendous scope for collective action through collaboration with the government, unions, people’s movements and gram sabhas to ensure effective implementation of NREGA
T he Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) has been hailed as a landmark legislation in India because it places the concept of rights at the centre stage of the processes of the Act’s implementation. A rights-based approach to development seeks to empower people themselves, especially the most marginalized, and to hold accountable those who have a duty to act (UNHCHR, 2006). This people-centred approach is reflected in several measures of the NREGA, for example, in the vesting of power and responsibility of planning with the gram sabha, whereby people come together as a community to plan for their collective development. Another example is the demand-based approach to work, whereby individual workers and households have to seek work actively by demanding it from the government.
In other words, the rights-based approach incorporated in the NREGA focuses on people as individuals being active agents of their own development. Taking this as the point of departure, this article explores stories of the agents of development— individuals and communities—that the NREGA seeks to activate through empowerment. These stories were gathered during a three-day visit to Khunti block in Jharkhand in February 2010. Though the instances cited later in this article may be nothing more than context-specific impressions, the larger picture they paint is more universal/general in nature. By ‘universal/general’, I do not mean that these are representative of larger trends in the implementation of the NREGA in Jharkhand but that these reflect concerns and sentiments, and highlight problems of power and agency on the ground faced by several ‘agents of development’ that the Act seeks to employ. Before delving into these stories, I am going to outline the context in which these have been gathered.