Employment, Poverty and Rights in India In comparison to other social groups, India’s rural poor – and particularly Adivasis and Dalits – have seen little benefit from the country’s economic growth over the last three decades. Though economists and statisticians are able to model the form and extent of this inequality, their work is rarely concerned with identifying possible causes. Employment, Poverty and Rights in India analyses unemployment in India and explains why the issues of employment and unemployment should be the appropriate prism to understand the status of well-being in India. The author provides a historical analysis of policy interventions on behalf of the colonial and postcolonial state with regard to the alleviation of unemployment and poverty in India and in West Bengal in particular. Arguing that, as long as poverty – either as a concept or as an empirical condition – remains as a technical issue to be managed by governmental technologies, the ‘poor’ will be held responsible for their own fate and the extent of poverty will continue to increase. The book contends that rural unemployment in India is not just an economic issue but a political process that has consistently been shaped by various socio-economic, political and cultural factors since the colonial period. The analysis which depends mainly on ethnography extends to the implementation of the ‘New Rights Agenda’, such as the MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act), at the rural margin. Challenging the dominant approach to poverty, this book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of South Asian studies, Indian Political Economy, contemporary political theories, poverty studies, neoliberalism, sociology and social anthropology, as well as development studies. Dayabati Roy is a sociologist by training and currently attached with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India. She has published articles in various journals including Modern Asian Studies, and she is the author of Rural Politics in India: Political Stratification and Governance in West Bengal (2013). Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series Media as Politics in South Asia Edited by Sahana Udupa and Stephen D. 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The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis. com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license . Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Roy, Dayabati, author. Title: Employment, poverty and rights in India / Dayabati Roy. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; NewYork, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge contemporary South Asia series ; 125 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018006663 | ISBN 9781138479586 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351065429 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Rural unemployment—India. | Manpower policy, Rural—India. | Poverty—India. | Rural development—India. Classification: LCC HD5710.85.I4 R39 2019 | DDC 331.12/0420954—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006663 ISBN: 978-1-138-47958-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-06542-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Preface and acknowledgements vi List of abbreviations viii 1 Introduction: land, capital and well-being in India 1 2 Right to work! Politics of poverty alleviation policies in India 22 3 Political parties, employment generation policies and governance 47 4 Caste, class and rural employment 80 5 ‘Civil society’, NGOs and rural employment 110 6 Women, gender and employment in rural West Bengal 138 7 Conclusion: employment, capital and the state in rural India 166 Glossary 190 Index 193 Preface and acknowledgements When I was about to finish fieldwork in the year 2008 in rural part of an Indian state, West Bengal, for my doctoral thesis, I was struck by a major question. Why employment is hard to find even in agriculturally prosperous villages of India? This question had been carried over to my future research. I saw Pakhi Murmu, one of my informants, was in terrible shape throughout. Pakhi Murmu was a landless peasant, but one among those 2.8 million fortunate peasants in West Bengal who had managed to obtain 3200 sq cubic of vested, or patta, land meant for cultivation thanks to the redistributive land reforms during the Left Front Regime (1977–2011). He and his wife used this land to cultivate a very small portion of land leasing in from different landholding families, and to work as day-labourer if available on others’ land in and around the village over the years. How can they manage then the whole year to eke out a living? This might be an interesting question, but this question had not motivated me so that I would undertake the current research. The question which motivated me most is: why is rural employment scarce in India? What is the impact of the so-called achievements of green revolution technology (GRT) and the programme of land reforms on the rural poor? After doing a decade-long empirical research into this major question, this book explains why the peasants in India have continually been confronted with predicaments posed by economic uncertainties, unemployment or underemployment, and why even the non-farm work as well as the remittances cannot rescue the jobless villagers. Through navigating the history of policy interventions on behalf of the colonial and postcolonial state in regard to alleviation of unemployment and poverty in India and in West Bengal in particular, it explores how unemployment has been created and shaped complexly at the rural margin. In theoretical terms, this book argues that rural unemployment in India is not just an economic issue but a political process that has consistently been shaped by various socio-economic, political and cultural factors since the British period. It also looks at the way the issues of unemployment have been reconstructed as consequences of the implementation ‘New Rights Agenda’ like the MGNREGA at the rural margin. This book has taken a longer time to write than I planned initially. So it has no doubt that the list of intellectual debts I have accumulated along the way is long. First of all, I express my gratitude to those villagers who speak through the pages of this book in their own voices. They are not just my informants in fieldwork, but Preface and acknowledgements vii the ones who have shaped my understanding about rural employment through their wit and wisdom. I acknowledge the support of the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation, Denmark. The post doctoral grant I received from this agency enabled me to accomplish this research, to engage in collaborative effort and to interact with many people in this field. I would like to mention the helpful attitude of Prof. Ravinder Kaur as well as other faculty members of the Department of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. Supplementary financial support was obtained from the Eastern Regional Centre (ERC), Indian Council of Social Science Research, which made it possible to write this book. I am immensely grateful, particularly, to Prof. Manabi Majumdar, the Honorary Director, ERC, for her kind gesture in providing this book-writing grant for completing this book. The University of Copenhagen as well as the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, was very supportive in facilitating my research and manuscript preparation respectively. I had intensive interactions with the officials of West Bengal government and a couple of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Their willingness to share their views with me was immensely helpful. Earlier drafts of some chapters have been presented at various conferences and seminars in the universities and institutes of India, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. I thank the organizers of these events as well as the participants who stimulated me with their insightful comments. I thank the Routledge editors for their patience and support, and the anonymous reviewers