IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/wdevel/v103y2018icp284-296.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Public Policy Reform and Informal Institutions: The Political Articulation of the Demand for Work in Rural India

Author

Listed:
  • Marcesse, Thibaud

Abstract

The emphasis on rights that individual citizens can claim from the state represents a significant institutional development for poverty alleviation policies. In India, important legislation was passed in 2005 to guarantee rural households 100 days of work paid at a statutory wage rate. This Right to Work legislation has enabled the implementation of the world’s largest public works program—the “Mahatma Gandhi” National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme or NREGS. This study explores variation in policy outcomes under NREGS within a rural district of North India (Uttar Pradesh). It finds that this variation is the product of the interaction between formal and informal institutions. As such, the demand for work benefits does not emerge spontaneously from self-selecting rural citizens, but is articulated by local elected officials who are pressurised to accommodate demands for rents from the bureaucracy. Specifically, local elected officials are compelled to proceed to a selective activation of the demand for benefits to ensure the generation of a surplus which will form the basis of bureaucratic rent payments. The study relies on qualitative data, specifically interviews with past beneficiaries of the scheme, bureaucrats tasked with policy implementation, and elected village leaders (the Gram Pradhans in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh) to document the conditions under which a surplus is extracted and rent payments made. The study shows that caste and political leadership structures at the local level affect the generation of surpluses and the payment of rents by Gram Pradhans to the bureaucracy. While the Right to Work legislation represents progress for poverty alleviation, policies such as NREGS that emphasize rights and the expression of a demand for benefits need to consider more carefully the conditions under which this demand emerges as well as the ways in which discretionary authority can thwart the goals of public policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Marcesse, Thibaud, 2018. "Public Policy Reform and Informal Institutions: The Political Articulation of the Demand for Work in Rural India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 103(C), pages 284-296.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:103:y:2018:i:c:p:284-296
    DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.10.024
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X17303480
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.10.024?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Paul Niehaus & Sandip Sukhtankar, 2013. "Corruption Dynamics: The Golden Goose Effect," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 5(4), pages 230-269, November.
    2. Joshi, Anuradha, 2010. "Do Rights Work? Law, Activism, and the Employment Guarantee Scheme," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 38(4), pages 620-630, April.
    3. Puja Dutta & Stephen Howes & Rinku Murgai, 2010. "Small but effective: India's targeted unconditional cash transfers," ASARC Working Papers 2010-18, The Australian National University, Australia South Asia Research Centre.
    4. Maiorano, Diego, 2014. "The Politics of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in Andhra Pradesh," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 95-105.
    5. Kruks-Wisner, Gabrielle, 2011. "Seeking the Local State: Gender, Caste, and the Pursuit of Public Services in Post-Tsunami India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 39(7), pages 1143-1154, July.
    6. Bhavnani, Rikhil R., 2009. "Do Electoral Quotas Work after They Are Withdrawn? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in India," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 103(1), pages 23-35, February.
    7. Douglass C. North, 1991. "Institutions," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 5(1), pages 97-112, Winter.
    8. Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo & Clément Imbert & Santhosh Mathew & Rohini Pande, 2020. "E-governance, Accountability, and Leakage in Public Programs: Experimental Evidence from a Financial Management Reform in India," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 12(4), pages 39-72, October.
    9. Veron, Rene & Williams, Glyn & Corbridge, Stuart & Srivastava, Manoj, 2006. "Decentralized Corruption or Corrupt Decentralization? Community Monitoring of Poverty-Alleviation Schemes in Eastern India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 34(11), pages 1922-1941, November.
    10. Raghabendra Chattopadhyay & Esther Duflo, 2004. "Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 72(5), pages 1409-1443, September.
    11. Khera, Reetika (ed.), 2011. "The Battle for Employment Guarantee," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198070627.
    12. Rohini Pande, 2003. "Can Mandated Political Representation Increase Policy Influence for Disadvantaged Minorities? Theory and Evidence from India," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 93(4), pages 1132-1151, September.
    13. Herring, Ronald J. & Edwards, Rex M., 1983. "Guaranteeing employment to the rural poor: Social functions and class interests in the employment guarantee scheme in Western India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 11(7), pages 575-592, July.
    14. Niehaus, Paul & Sukhtankar, Sandip, 2013. "The marginal rate of corruption in public programs: Evidence from India," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 52-64.
    15. Avinash Dixit, 2002. "# Incentives and Organizations in the Public Sector: An Interpretative Review," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 37(4), pages 696-727.
    16. Shankar, Shylashri & Gaiha, Raghav, 2013. "Battling Corruption: Has NREGA Reached India's Rural Poor?," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198085003.
    17. Das, Upasak, 2015. "Does Political Activism and Affiliation Affect Allocation of Benefits in the Rural Employment Guarantee Program: Evidence from West Bengal, India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 202-217.
    18. S. Mahendra Dev, 1996. "Experience of India's (Maharashtra) Employment Guarantee Scheme: Lessons for Development Policy," Development Policy Review, Overseas Development Institute, vol. 14(3), pages 227-254, September.
    19. Chauchard, Simon, 2014. "Can Descriptive Representation Change Beliefs about a Stigmatized Group? Evidence from Rural India," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 108(2), pages 403-422, May.
    20. Wade, Robert, 1985. "The market for public office: Why the Indian state is not better at development," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 13(4), pages 467-497, April.
    21. Deshingkar, Priya & Johnson, Craig & Farrington, John, 2005. "State transfers to the poor and back: The case of the Food-for-Work program in India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 575-591, April.
    22. Gulzar, Saad & Pasquale, Benjamin J., 2017. "Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Development: Evidence from India," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 111(1), pages 162-183, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Das, Upasak & Maiorano, Diego, 2019. "Post-clientelistic initiatives in a patronage democracy: The distributive politics of India’s MGNREGA," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 239-252.
    2. Indrajit Roy, 2019. "Class Politics and Social Protection: A Comparative Analysis of Local Governments in India," Journal of South Asian Development, , vol. 14(2), pages 121-150, August.
    3. Das, Ritanjan & Dey, Subhasish & Neogi, Ranjita, 2021. "Across the stolen Ponds: The political geography of social welfare in rural eastern India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 146(C).
    4. Izabela Ostoj, 2019. "On the validity of the division into formal and informal institutions," Ekonomia i Prawo, Uniwersytet Mikolaja Kopernika, vol. 18(1), pages 61-72, March.
    5. Barbara Rohregger & Katja Bender & Bethuel Kinuthia & Esther Schüring & Grace Ikua & Nicky Pouw, 2018. "The politics of implementation or why institutional interaction matters: The role of traditional authorities in delivering pro-poor social policies in Kenya," IZNE Working Paper Series 18/2, International Centre for Sustainable Development (IZNE), Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences.
    6. Fischer, Harry W. & Ali, Syed Shoaib, 2019. "Reshaping the public domain: Decentralization, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), and trajectories of local democracy in rural India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 147-158.
    7. Touseef Yousuf Mir, 2023. "Strong Military and Weak Statehood: The Case of Self‐Governance Through Rasookh in Kashmir," Politics and Governance, Cogitatio Press, vol. 11(2), pages 315-325.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Indrajit Roy, 2019. "Class Politics and Social Protection: A Comparative Analysis of Local Governments in India," Journal of South Asian Development, , vol. 14(2), pages 121-150, August.
    2. Akerkar, Supriya & Joshi, P.C. & Fordham, Maureen, 2016. "Cultures of Entitlement and Social Protection: Evidence from Flood Prone Bahraich, Uttar Pradesh, India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 46-58.
    3. Das, Ritanjan & Dey, Subhasish & Neogi, Ranjita, 2021. "Across the stolen Ponds: The political geography of social welfare in rural eastern India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 146(C).
    4. Klonner, Stefan & Oldiges, Christian, 2022. "The welfare effects of India’s rural employment guarantee," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 157(C).
    5. Rikhil R. Bhavnani & Alexander Lee, 2021. "Does Affirmative Action Worsen Bureaucratic Performance? Evidence from the Indian Administrative Service," American Journal of Political Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 65(1), pages 5-20, January.
    6. Sheahan, Megan & Liu, Yanyan & Barrett, Christopher B. & Narayanan, Sudha, 2014. "The political economy of MGNREGS spending in Andhra Pradesh:," IFPRI discussion papers 1371, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    7. Deininger, Klaus & Liu, Yanyan, 2019. "Heterogeneous welfare impacts of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme: Evidence from Andhra Pradesh, India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 98-111.
    8. Jeong, Dahyeon & Shenoy, Ajay & Zimmermann, Laura V., 2023. "De Jure versus De Facto transparency: Corruption in local public office in India," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 221(C).
    9. Adam Michael Auerbach & Adam Ziegfeld, 2016. "How Do Electoral Quotas Influence Political Competition? Evidence from Municipal, State, and National Elections in India," Working Papers 2016-16, The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy.
    10. Das, Upasak & Maiorano, Diego, 2019. "Post-clientelistic initiatives in a patronage democracy: The distributive politics of India’s MGNREGA," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 239-252.
    11. Desai, Raj M. & Olofsgård, Anders, 2019. "Can the poor organize? Public goods and self-help groups in rural India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 121(C), pages 33-52.
    12. Karthik Muralidharan & Paul Niehaus & Sandip Sukhtankar, 2016. "Building State Capacity: Evidence from Biometric Smartcards in India," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 106(10), pages 2895-2929, October.
    13. Paul Vertier, 2018. "The democratic challenges of electoral representation and populism : an empirical approach [Les défis démocratiques de la représentation électorale et du populisme : une approche empirique]," SciencePo Working papers Main tel-03419534, HAL.
    14. Sudha Narayanan Narayanan & Nicolas Gerber, 2016. "Safety Nets for Food and Nutritional Security in India," FOODSECURE Working papers 37, LEI Wageningen UR.
    15. Sudha Narayanan & Nicolas Gerber, 2015. "Social safety nets for food and nutritional security in India," Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai Working Papers 2015-031, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, India.
    16. Anindya Bhattacharya & Anirban Kar & Alita Nandi, 2016. "Local Institutional Structure and Clientelistic Access to Employment: The Case of MGNREGS in Three States of India," Working Papers id:11549, eSocialSciences.
    17. Fischer, Harry W. & Ali, Syed Shoaib, 2019. "Reshaping the public domain: Decentralization, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), and trajectories of local democracy in rural India," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 147-158.
    18. Abhijit Banerjee & Esther Duflo & Clément Imbert & Santhosh Mathew & Rohini Pande, 2020. "E-governance, Accountability, and Leakage in Public Programs: Experimental Evidence from a Financial Management Reform in India," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 12(4), pages 39-72, October.
    19. Victoire Girard, 2021. "Stabbed in the back? Mandated political representation and murders," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 56(4), pages 595-634, May.
    20. Bhalotra, Sonia & Clots-Figueras, Irma & Iyer, Lakshmi, 2013. "Path-Breakers: How Does Women’s Political Participation Respond to Electoral Success?," Economics Discussion Papers 9008, University of Essex, Department of Economics.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:103:y:2018:i:c:p:284-296. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.