Competing to empower the poor

In a strange but ironic sense, democracy and the MGNREGA, also known as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, share the common destiny of "battling corruption" since their inception. The fact that they are not only alive and kicking but have also deepened enough is strikingly captured by Shylashri Shankar and Raghav Gaiha, seasoned development researchers, in their painstakingly original research.

The redistributive potential of the NREGA is well known among political economy scholars, and it is measured in the book by the usual analyses of "uniform transfers" and "mandatory transfers" of income. But, in an intuitive application of political philosopher John Rawls' famous "difference principle", the authors have boldly experimented with the "Rawlsian max min transfer" to judge - empirically and normatively - whether or not the NREGA can be treated "justice as fairness".

The book will surely disappoint descriptive statisticians and theoretical purists; but it is a pure delight in terms of methodological eclectics. Combining the probit model (a statistical tool) with interviews and group discussions, the sophisticated blending of "econometric and ethnographic analyses" is anchored in emerging consensus in development studies about the advantage of cross-disciplinary conceptual tools in unravelling how structures of power relations impact social protection programmes.

Though the richly layered context dependent on emic validity (or analysis based on how local people perceive their world) and reflexive analysis that ethnography promises is missing, the authors have shown us promising ways in which "participatory econometrics" can enrich rights-based development programmes for the poor. The book may be NREGA-specific, but it will fascinate Hegelian admirers of the state and Tocquevillian acolytes of civic engagement.

It revolves around a classic conundrum in development economics and political science: how can the state become more responsive to its citizens and how can citizens, especially the more vulnerable sections, ensure such responsiveness by the state? This also informs the narrative on corruption and various accountability mechanisms, including community social audits, for the implementation of the NREGA.

So what matters in "battling corruption" and ensuring the NREGA's success? The authors have succinctly argued - by a realistic appraisal of the programme in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh - that if the NREGA has not realised its transformatory potential, it is not an unmitigated failure either. They concur that the poor, especially "the acutely poor", have benefited from the NREGA in the four states. But they also assert that more "acutely poor" are excluded from the NREGA compared to the moderately poor and the non-poor, as "they tend to be illiterate, least socially networked, lower caste and landless".

That is no surprise. The poor are often unhappy in democracies, as Aristotle cautioned us long ago. It is here that the book makes a theoretical departure from the conventional analysis of the mobilisation of the poor in ensuring the success of anti-poverty programmes. Recent studies suggest that, in a democracy, political competition results in empowering the poor and reducing corruption in anti-poverty programmes. On the basis of this insight, the authors propose and defend the "political competition index" to assess the effectiveness of formal and informal "rules of the game" - such as political decentralisation, community social audits, access to information, membership in social networks and, more significantly, political competition - in ensuring the NREGA's success.

Inspired by the "empowerment framework" posited by Deepa Narayan and Patti Petesch and economist Timothy Besley's notion of "moderate politics", the authors persuasively argue that, although the "effect of political competition varies with the level", political competition induces greater effort by the winning candidate to target public goods. More precisely, the NREGA has performed better in those villages where there is competition for the post of sarpanch compared to villages without such competition. Predictably, the results from their studies show that the effect of political competition in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh is positive, whereas in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan the effect is negative.

It is also here that the authors seem to have exposed themselves to charges of espousing the deeply conservative notion of "moderate politics" by suggesting that extremely high levels of competition are detrimental to poor people's participation in the scheme in the two southern states and Rajasthan, while in Madhya Pradesh such high political competition enhances their entry. It is this dangerously flawed notion that leads the authors to conclude that "In village after village, the heads of the poorest households said they would accept whatever was given to them, and that they could not question the powerful people". Despite James Scott's classic Weapons of the Weak and historic mobilisation of the poor by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan and right to food activists, the authors betray a fear of the autonomous politics of poor and subalterns in the NREGA. This also explains why they fail to see in their field visits that, perhaps more than the conspiratorial and secretive nature of corruption, the NREGA is often ambushed by the arbitrary bureaucratic practices to discipline and suppress the poor and marginalised.

Make no mistake, no amount of Procrustean institutional engineering - such as Andhra Pradesh's top-down social audit directorates and the supra-statist Aadhaar-enabled "new-age digital public service delivery systems" - will reduce corruption unless transformatory politics of justice informs the implementation of the NREGA. And it is this politics of the poor that has enabled the NREGA to prove Hamlet wrong. So, I am not surprised if the NREGA is alive and kicking!

The reviewer is professor and chairperson of the Centre for Public Policy, Habitat and Human Development at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Mumbai). He is also former member of the Central Employment Guarantee Council

BATTLING CORRUPTION
Has NREGA Reached India's Rural Poor?
Shylashri Shankar and Raghav Gaiha
Oxford University Press; 288 pages; Rs 825