In September 2006, a year after the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act had been passed in Parliament, I joined a social audit team in rural Andhra Pradesh to audit the newly opened NREGA worksites in villages in Ranga-Reddy district. Born out of the Right to Information movement, social audits were legally mandated. Andhra Pradesh was the first state to institutionalise the process. The audits involved verifying government records with the lived experiences of workers, culminating in a public hearing, where citizens seeking redress — for work not provided or wages siphoned off — presented their testimonies alongside audit findings before government officials.
The exercise was complex and tedious, lasting days, with the team visiting houses to meet NREGA workers, verifying documents and organising gram sabhas. It made me wonder: what’s the point of a “right” or a “law” if extracting even a meagre daily wage from the state was such a fight?
As days passed and we saw workers who had been denied wages receiving their due at the public hearing, I began to recognise the power of these “rights”. It was the state’s reluctant recognition of citizens’ “right to work” that empowered workers and legitimised their demands for accountability for “work” and “wages”. This was not a lost battle; it was an active process of using democratic tools to build an accountable and responsive state.
The introduction of the Viksit Bharat: Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission Bill (VB-GRAMG), 2025, and the consequent undoing of the MGNREGA bring back these memories of social audits and the promise of state building that the MGNREGA once embodied.
Also read: Why the VB-GRAMG Bill strikes at the heart of MGNREGA
From mai-baapism to rights
The power of the MGNREGA lay not just in the work and wages it offered rural India, but in its framing of work as a “right” — an employment guarantee. In the decades after Independence, socio-economic rights were pushed to the margins of India’s social contract. Instead of being treated as an essential responsibility toward citizens, the state’s welfare obligations were cast as patronage or the charity of the mai-baap sarkar. This entrenched deeply asymmetric power dynamics between the state and citizens, allowing the state to routinely escape accountability and leaving citizens at the mercy of petty bureaucrats and local politicians, with no sites of redress.
In the debate preceding Parliament’s legislation of the NREGA, several commentators dismissed the Act as the embodiment of the mai-baap statist ideology from which the Indian economy needed to be freed. This view exposed a complete ignorance of the harsh realities of the rural economy and what the MGNREGA sought to do. At one level, the MGNREGA functioned as a safety net for the poorest, but it was anchored in a far more radical vision: the transformation of the mai-baap sarkar. By clearly articulating a set of procedural entitlements — guaranteed, demand-driven employment; local planning; and social audits — the law sought to empower citizens to engage the state on more equal terms as rights-bearing citizens, rather than as passive recipients of mai-baap largesse. This was an attempt at a fundamental reworking of the social contract.
Of course, implementation was half-baked. The conviction that drove the legislation was not matched by long-term investments in implementation. Too much centralisation and too little investment in administrative capacity — particularly at the panchayat level — and, above all, a lack of political commitment meant that the project of citizen empowerment was haltingly implemented. Andhra Pradesh was one of the few states that implemented social audits in both letter and spirit. In the breach, the seductive promise of technology took hold.
Over the years, the MGNREGA became a testing ground for all forms of technological experiments — from biometric authentication and just-in-time payments to geo-spatial mapping. But as scores of studies and social audits have shown, these interventions neither ensured work and wages as mandated by law nor empowered panchayats to genuinely plan and implement the programme. The vision of state-building baked into the MGNREGA was all but abandoned. And the rights-claiming citizen was reduced to a labharthi — a beneficiary and a vote bank.
Also read: The long arc of rural employment—from welfare to rights to rationing
Techno-patrimonialism
Indeed, this is the biggest difference between the rights-based welfare imagined in the MGNREGA and the technology-driven cash transfer obsession that now dominates welfare delivery. The legitimacy of cash transfers lies in their ability to bypass corrupt and incompetent layers of the state. But in doing so, they also enable party leaders to establish a direct and emotive connection with citizens, making it politically feasible to shift attribution for welfare benefits away from the state and local political actors to the leader at the top.
This has led to a subtle shift in the social contract away from rights. Welfare delivery is no longer framed as a core moral obligation of the state toward rights-bearing citizens, one that is negotiated through institutionalised mechanisms of accountability. Instead, it has become a function of what the leader deems best for society. This, in turn, structures the political and electoral appeal of the leader to the citizen. This is what I have characterised, with my co-author Neelanjan Sircar, as “techno-patrimonialism”.
Inevitably, the discourse on state-building for welfare has shifted away from creating sites through which citizens can seek accountability and demand services from local state actors. Instead, the citizen is recast as a labharthi, who needs to prove eligibility, enter a database, and receive the largesse of a benevolent leader. This is patrimonialism fuelled by technology, not a rights-based state. With the growing power of digital systems, participation, accountability, and rights have all but disappeared from the grammar of governance.
Despite the proliferation of cash transfers and the constant infusion of technological fixes, the MGNREGA has remained a fixture in India’s welfare architecture. It has been subjected to all forms of techno-patrimonialism, but its name, its legal guarantee, and its implementation design were a continuous reminder of the promise of what a genuine rights-based state-building project could achieve. The VB-GRAMG will now undo all of this — leaving the project of radical transformation of the state into yet another form of mai-baapism, this time in the guise of techno-patrimonialism. Its implications for India’s democracy and the rights of the country’s rural workers are significant.
Yamini Aiyar is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Saxena Center and Watson Institute, Brown University, and the former President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research. Her X handle is @AiyarYamini. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)
The Print should not take its readers for fools!
The Print should explain to their guest columnists – particularly those from the Mani Shankar Aiyar stable – that they need to provide reasoned arguments backed up by data. We are used to excellent articles from The Print editorial staff which are well informed and backed by data. PLEASE don’t demean your publication and your readers by publishing such one sided, illogical articles which are devoid of any factual data
The author says all the benefits of MGNREGA will be undone by VB-GRAMG. But she didn’t mention even a single statement on why she thinks so. Either she doesn’t know anything about VB-GRAMG or she is a blind Congress supporter.
This article is a dishonest exercise in verbal gymnastics. Calling middle- men free, corruption free direct transfer of the State’s assets to the poorest, is techno-revolutionary. MNREGA’s imagined citizenship rights never materialized. And any vision is good enough only if it can be materialized. The author sounds like she and her collaborators know so well to do this or has such a great feeling about how MNREGA empowers even when in reality it didn’t. It is a lie to state that people were not labharthis under MNREGA. People were labharthis under MNREGA as well having to deal with local micro politics and middle
Men and as a result devoid of dignity. What changes Mai-bapism to empowerment is dignity. By peoples own widespread admission through the ballot and first hand evidence is that the current techno-democratic approach of direct access to the rights of citizenship, is also bringing the notion of dignity. That is what the right of a citizen vis a vis a state should be. That is citizen – state equity in action as a result of direct democratic intervention. And as others have commented there is no discussion of the merits of the VB- GRAM system. That itself belies the author’s concern about equity between state and citizen. If she as author cannot bring even basic transparency to the reader, and treat the reader with dignity and on an equal stance, how is she qualified to comment on any form of democratic equity? Her primary grouse seems to be that the leader at the top gets full and complete positive response from the labharthis. This is pure envy wrapped up as academic verbiage.
Dear Print editorial team, for a publication that insits on waxing eloquent about “independent” and “dehyphenated” journalism, you sure do struggle with providing a full disclosure – literally days after “that” movie review related tamasha, where you conveniently forgot to mention the so called film critics guild’s leadership were the same individuals it was defending, thereby raising questions of bias in their stance, you have yet again neglected to mention the author of this article is the daughter of former “panchayat raj” minister Mani Shankar Aiyar. Even shopping mall lucky draws forbid relatives of employees from participating as a precaution against bias. That’s how you create an echo chamber.
This is such an incomplete article. MGNREGA is now history. It has been replaced by G RAM G. But there is no discussion of the new scheme, no comparison of provisions and nothing about relative merits. We need a more extensive coverage.