The shift from the Washington consensus (WC) to the post-Washington consensus (PWC) in the late 1990s and,
subsequently, the emergence of the paradigm of Inclusive Growth (IG) have placed a new emphasis on social
protection policies for the poor in the Global South. Consistent with the consolidation of a socially sensitive
mainstream approach to development, India introduced the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act
(NREGA) in 2005. This employment scheme gives a legal guarantee of 100 days of employment per year in
public works to any rural household whose members are willing to do manual labour and entitles workers to
minimum wage. The World Bank has acknowledged NREGA as a driver of inclusive growth.
Given its recognized importance, a vast number of studies has been conducted on NREGA thus far. However,
relevant social dynamics both underpinning and engendered by NREGA are still underexplored. On the one
hand, there are no comprehensive, historically grounded analysis of the social power dynamics underlying the
processes of elaboration of NREGA at an all-India level. On the other hand, the processes through which NREGA
has opened up new political spaces for the defence and re-articulation of labour policies by subaltern social strata
are still understudied. These are critical gaps in the literature on the scheme, which POLIs will contribute to
address.
In this respect, POLIS aims to investigate:
i) the politics of NREGA at the national level, focusing on the political conflicts and mediations between
different actors that accompanied the elaboration of the scheme, its revisions and the allocation of funds;
ii) the politics of subaltern social strata coalesced around NREGA, with specific attention to the period from
2014 to the present, characterized by a downsizing of the scheme under the Hindu nationalist-led coalition
governments. In particular, POLIs will focus on the political agenda of the NREGA Sangharsh Morcha, a
national platform formed in defence of NREGA. This objective is of the the outmost relevance today, given the
dramatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Indian workforce.
Yet, a comprehensive analysis of the politics of NREGA should also engage theoretically with the broader
context of the international development paradigms that informed the scheme. POLIs intends to advance the
theoretical debate on the PWC and IG paradigms, analysing their social policy agenda in the light of the
Gramscian concept of ‘integral state’. This concept designates, in essential terms, the dialectical union of
‘political society’, or the state traditional apparatus, and ‘civil society’, namely a whole set of organizations, or
hegemonic apparatuses, which constitute the realm of consent. By using the concept of ‘integral state’ to examine
the PWC-IG social policy agendas, POLIs will move towards a framework able to capture the dialectic of social
policy in the Global South, which will be used to interrogate the politics of NREGA