Blaming welfare schemes for labour woes ignores real economic shifts

For India Inc, like big business everywhere, the standard response is to view welfarism as an impediment to business plans

About a year after the United Progressive Alliance launched its signature rural employment guarantee scheme, a sugar baron was heard complaining on a post-Budget TV show that the NREGA, or the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (as it was called then before “Mahatma Gandhi” was prefixed to it in 2009), had made it difficult to find labour to bring in that year’s sugarcane harvest. In Punjab, the media reported, farmers faced a similar labour crisis for the kharif harvest. Soon, an MGNREGA-driven labour shortage rapidly became the received wisdom in corporate circles. This, even as it increasingly became clear that