Explained : Fertile politics, failed debate and Its Impact

On January 5, the Congress party will launch ‘save MGNREGA’ movement. The rural poor need all the help they can get. MGNREGA was enacted in 2005 and has helped millions. Yet, a generation later, why is that part of India not in reasonable shape?

I believe the battle over MGNREGA is, by default, political. The Bharatiya Janata Party seeks to claim another mantle of beneficence, while the Congress refuses to relinquish its legacy. Both are indirectly admitting that they have failed in their mission to improve village life substantively.

The scheme guarantees 100 days of unskilled manual work per year to every rural household. Wages vary by state: Haryana pays the highest daily wage (₹374), while Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh pay the lowest (₹234). Wages are funded entirely by the Centre, with material and administrative costs shared with the states.

Crucially, these wages are not equivalent to state-mandated minimum wages, which are higher. In Kerala, for instance, the minimum wage for construction work can exceed ₹1,000 a day. This explains why the Bilaspur Express arrives weekly in Kerala, crammed with aspirants from Chhattisgarh. This migration persists despite the ever-present risk of violence, as witnessed in the recent lynching of migrant labourer Ram Narayan.

The BJP-led government is not formally ‘repealing’ the scheme—though it may consider excising Mahatma Gandhi from its name for political reasons. The Modi administration prefers to build parallel welfare systems, exemplified by the PM-KISAN, which provides direct cash transfers.

The popular narrative, however, suggests a simple swap is imminent—a misreading. The confusion begins with equating MGNREGA’s value with PM-KISAN’s ₹6,000 grant. MGNREGA is a wage programme; its annual potential is the state-specific daily wage multiplied by 100 days.

The work, in theory, involves creating public assets like ponds and roads. In practice, it is often meaningless—how many ponds can one village dig? Are new roads being built gratuitously? Are the old ones finished? Is there reliable audit? A misplaced sense of grandiosity prevents us from categorising necessary tasks like caring for the elderly, clearing waste or planting trees as ‘work’. So perhaps we end up digging the same ponds.

In contrast, PM-KISAN’s ₹6,000, is a fixed annual income supplement for land-owning farmers, not a wage. To mistake it for a substitute is to argue that a jugaad is the real thing.

MGNREGA primarily serves rural households demanding manual labour. PM-KISAN supports land-owning farmer families. While their clientele overlaps for small farmers, a critical mass of India’s poorest—the landless labourer—qualifies for MGNREGA but is excluded from PM-KISAN. Presenting cash transfers as a blanket replacement ignores this demographic chasm.

Politically, the discourse has been simplified into a partisan clash. The Congress frames the threat as outright abolition. The BJP’s rhetoric dismisses MGNREGA as a monument to Congress-era corruption while touting the ‘efficiency’ of direct bank transfers.

The true confrontation, however, is subtler. The government is not deleting MGNREGA from the statute books—that would be counterproductive. Instead, it is pursuing a strategy of parallel construction and asphyxiation by neglect. Politically, it pays to slowly choke a Congress-credited scheme rather than execute an immediate beheading.

Equally importantly, it allows for the erection of a new welfare edifice stamped with the BJP’s lotus symbol—or the face of Narendra Modi. A direct benefit transfer (DBT) means total control over the freebie.

This model has administrative elegance: money moves from the treasury directly to a bank account, minimising bureaucratic intermediaries. Simultaneously, MGNREGA is likely to be subjected to budgetary constraints, chronic payment delays, and a narrative that paints it as a wasteful dole. The objective is not repeal but gradual marginalisation—making the DBT model so dominant that the work-based alternative seems anachronistic.

Here lies the ideological heart of the conflict: a fundamental disagreement on the nature of welfare itself. MGNREGA is born from a philosophy of rights and public goods. It guarantees a ‘right to work’, affirming the state’s role as an employer. But the work itself is often redundant.

The DBT model champions digital efficiency and individual agency. Its appeal lies in its simplicity and its direct line of political credit from the central government to the citizen, bypassing layers of local governance. The source, power, and credit are centralised. So, potentially, are the votes of the indebted—as happened in the recent Bihar elections, where women received ₹10,000 in their accounts from the prime minister’s office.

What is at stake is not the exchange of one sum for another, but the supplanting of one model of governance with another. It has its attendant dangers. Yet the real question remains unaddressed. After all these years, why have rural India schemes failed to generate economies of scale and create productive jobs?

The Congress party blames colonial exploitation; writers like Shashi Tharoor have almost mythologised the notion of a (very) rich eighteenth-century India. The BJP, in turn, blames not only the Congress but also the British and the Mughals for India’s arrested development. For them, true freedom began much more recently, around 2014.

The debate over MGNREGA is, in a profound sense, false. But it is the stuff of politics. The real debate is whether India has failed its destiny in its villages. I believe it has. Ask Ram Narayan.

C P Surendran | Author whose latest volume of poetry is Window with a Train Attached

(Views are personal)

(cpsurendran@gmail.com)