Paper short abstract:

Looking at a policy that creates public property as a piece of property itself, this paper studies it by looking at three moments in its three year long life – its birth/authorship; its subsequent appropriation by different actors in its new avatar as a revolutionary, anti-poverty scheme; and the confusing and chaotic effects of the implementation of the scheme – in a bid to understand the operations of state power in India.

Paper long abstract:

In 2005 an unlikely coalition of political parties won India's national elections. Estimating that they owed their shock win to the disgruntled 'rural unemployed', the newly formed government's first move was to enact what is retrospectively termed their flagship programme: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Hailed as a radical piece of legislation, the NREGA guarantees employment in public works programme at minimum wages for 100 days in a year to a member of any rural household in India. The assets created from this work are deemed the property of the village. Despite my 16 months of fieldwork, confusion over the origins and the authoring of the NREGA remains due to the conflicting claims of various actors. Who or what, then, authored it? Post-enactment, does ownership change hands from, say, the legislature who wrote it to the executive who implements it? A proprietorial attitude is evident from all the stakeholders when it comes to the avowed intent of the Act i.e. the extermination of rural poverty in India. This exists alongside a gentle disassociation from the NREGA's reportedly poor performance. On the subject of performance, it has been two years since its implementation and yet no agreement on its impact can be arrived upon. Is this inherent in the nature of development schemes in this gigantic country or is this, as I argue, publicly acknowledged lack of clarity and the raucous feuding over ownership of the Act, a mode through which power is, silently and invisibly on the side, exercised?