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Paper short abstract

This paper presents my doctoral research on the outcomes and transformative impacts of Employment Guarantee Schemes in India. These were impacts that empowered workers by improving their bargaining power and their capacity to act collectively, allowing them to challenge structural inequalities.

Paper long abstract

This paper utilises a comparative political economy approach to studying the implementation of social programmes, its outcomes and transformative impacts. The social programme is analysed as a production intervention and as a conflictual social process.

The research compares India’s flagship National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in four villages in Karnataka in south India. The villages varied in terms of the distribution of productive assets, agroecology and integration with the wider economy. The research asks if, how and under what conditions, can the social programme contribute to incremental processes of transformation in rural contexts.

The comparative case demonstrated how outcomes were structured by the social relations of production, even as its implementation could potentially transform (or have transformative impacts on) these relations. These were impacts that contributed to the positive freedoms of labour, i.e., its bargaining power vis a vis rural employers and its capacity to act collectively in pursuit of shared interests. The research emphasised an under-explored impact of the social programme, i.e., its role as a social wage, providing labour with economic and political resources to improve its socio-political conditions, which, in the current case, was through its organised collective action.

The analysis of transformation focussed on iterative processes of struggle between competing sets of class interests, identifying the social programme as a site of class struggle. The research found processes of transformation to be contingent on a dynamic ainteraction between class struggles in the capital-labour relation and in the relations that structure the distribution of public resources.