Paper short abstract:

This paper discuses 'clientelism' as the politics of poor and also politics around poor. In reference to NREGS, we show how poor can ensure the benefit with an explicit political support to the ruling party and how ruling party ensures its re-election by distributing the benefit clientilistically.

Paper long abstract:

Our primary objective in this paper is to see, whether explicit political affiliation with the Village Council level ruling-party, helps the households to obtain additional benefits under National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) of India over time. On the one hand, recent cross-section studies showed how NREGS politically captured, and the ruling-party distributed the fund in a clientelistic manner, and, on the other hand, studies have also claimed that no political meddling took place and that jobs were provisioned only on demand. Weaving in this debate with the larger debate of political clientelism and public good provision, this paper examines the altering marginal benefit over time, of a household in terms of accessing NREGS jobs when it offers political support to the ruling party. Using a three-wave (2009, 2010, and 2012) household-level longitudinal data from West Bengal, we find that, during the period covered by our survey, the right populist party- Trinomool Cngress (TMC) ruled Gram Panchayats (GP) promoted more political clientelism through distributing NREGS work than did the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPIM) or Left GPs. But we also find that political clientelism in the context of NREGS is gradually fading out over time. However, whether this result is a gradual depoliticisation of NREGS in general or one very much specific to the West Bengal political scenario is a question that is discussed carefully in the local context.