India has resources, but not the will: Jean Dreze on the future of MGNREGA

Economist Jean Dreze discusses MGNREGA's challenges, emphasizing India's resource abundance but lack of political will for worker empowerment.

Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005, (MGNREGA) is a pro-worker law implemented by an anti-worker system, economist Jean Dreze said, reflecting on how the country’s flagship rural employment programme, conceived as a rights-based guarantee, has increasingly been shaped by administrative practices that work against the workers it was meant to empower.

Mr. Dreze, who played a key role in the conceptualisation and drafting of the MGNREGA, was speaking on the “harsh realities of MGNREGA vs the proposed Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Bill (VB-G-RAM-G)” in the city on Thursday. During the discussion, he examined the changing trajectory of the MGNREGA, the pressures it faces today, and how policy decisions- from wage levels to digitisation have steadily weakened what was once envisioned as a rights-based safety net for rural workers.

“India is not a poor country. It is a country with a lot of poor people,” he said, arguing that the country’s problem today was not the absence of resources but the absence of political will to prioritise the livelihoods of its poorest citizens.

The MGNREGA was conceived as a legal guarantee of employment, giving rural households the right to demand up to 100 days of wage labour from the government. The law, he said, was designed to empower workers by shifting the relationship between citizens and the state. However, he argued that over time the spirit of the law has increasingly been undermined through administrative restrictions, delayed payments, and policy decisions that weaken workers’ ability to actually claim their rights.

Mr. Dreze said one of the most worrying shifts has been the gradual transformation of the programme from a legal entitlement into something the government can effectively regulate or restrict or turn off and on, through administrative decisions. 

“What was recognised as a right and conferred as a right for people has now, with the VB-G RAM G Act, become a dispassionate thing that the government will turn on or turn off based on various preferences,” he said.